“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” Albert Einstein
It is Friday afternoon, New Years Day and I am stuck with having to start my story today. Like many of you, I have a very serious relationship with my routines and I have no problem wearing the mantle of neurosis in that regard. I will spare us both the painful ordeal of running through the full menu of manias that govern my days. However, I do owe you an explanation regarding my writing.
The most important thing about my writing is that I am always afraid I will just lose both the desire and the ability to even try. This is not a blanket criticism of insecurity, which does have its place, provided it doesn’t devour the effort.
There is a part of me that holds to routines, because I am always concerned I don’t have the discipline to just do my stuff, because I enjoy doing it. I do my daily Zen sit, I do my yoga and my time on the stationary bike, as if there is a drill sergeant, ominously lurking in the shadows, poised to yell at me for being undisciplined and lazy.
Consistency is very important in social media. It is a bitch to get people’s attention with a half-assed approach. When I initially started writing stories on my blog, they were kind of haphazard. Maybe, I wrote a couple each month and when I took some fabulous road trips, I wrote everyday. I can’t say for certain when I got into the groove of posting my stories every Sunday morning. Over time, I began to live in fear of that drill sergeant making me do one hundred push ups for not posting a weekly story.
So, here we are on News Years Day 2021 and I have to begin my story. It is also important to know that I never intend to finish a story each Friday afternoon. I will write a good percentage of my story and then drop it, not giving it a single thought until I revisit it on Saturday afternoon, another habit, handcuffed to time. The first thing I want to check and see is if I have gotten too carried away on some irrelevant tangent, clearly a problem for me.
I knew I didn’t want to join the chorus of voices, lamenting the tragedy and insanity of the year passed, nor do I have any interest in looking forward to a wonderful new world in 2021, which I don’t believe will be the case anyway, not by a long shot. The change from one year to the next is simply one click of the second hand and that’s it. Looking outside ourselves as passive participants, relying on the New Year for change, will be predictably disappointing. Life and time are inseparable, a borderless fluidity.
I don’t need a lot of help to think about time, but this upward click in calendar numerics makes it impossible for me to turn away. Each of us lives in our own unique house of time, with no two looking alike. My relationship with my life log has certainly changed with the accumulation of decades. Being busy socially and professionally were very positive traits for years and years. Answering “Not much” to the question “What’s new?” was definitely not a good life sign.
I am not exactly sure when I began to seriously value not doing much of anything. I made up my mind to write about this just yesterday. As promised up above, I have returned to this story after turning my back on it a number of paragraphs earlier. As for you, it is just one continuous stream of disparate ideas, ingested in one sitting. I, however, have spent the better part of the day, thinking about what I wrote yesterday. For both of our sakes, I dumped some useless distractions upon my revisit.
Until now, I hadn’t thought about what might have transpired to create this change, beyond the obvious passage of time. I am now positive it began upon my return to Kauai in September 2013. I had ceremoniously left the island, committed to relocating to Costa Rica. I was not happy with my life and a dramatic change was the prescription for what ailed me. I was definitely at war with time and movement was the antidote. I desperately needed something new and changing location was a helluva lot easier than changing myself.
My connection to Costa Rica is one of my all time great stories that I have recounted in my book, Halloween in Portland, in addition to any number of shared memories on this blog. I was a man with a plan and while it was perfect in my mind, it was a disaster in its implementation. Four days after setting up shop on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, I bought a one way ticket home to the island I loved, from the moment I set eyes upon her from above years earlier.
I came home, feeling a different rhythm with the dance of time. I was in my late 60’s by then and I wanted to be able to talk to myself, to take stock of where I had been and what this life has been about for me. When you leave this earthly address, what do you get to take with you? We’ve got no pockets, so possessions get left behind. Your invisible spirit gets to take the trip in your place and what is that all about?
So, I am spending this time creating the spirit vessel for my travels. I love having the time, also trying to find the words I can share with you about it all. I am not all that talented and I could not write any of this, unless I had gifted myself the time for it.
Often, I come up with titles for my stories, before I have even thought of the details, just because they sound kind of cool. I really liked the sound of, Time Out Of Mind, knowing I had heard it long ago, but having no idea what it actually means or where it came from. I looked it up and found that it was a phrase used in Moby Dick and the title of a Dylan album. it refers to a long duration of time and one that is not easily remembered. i would say my longevity qualifies, as does my inability to recall all I have forgotten.
The passage of time is forever, but our relationship to it is deeply personal and of our own unique design.
Happy New Day.