Time in a bottle

I went away for a weekend last week with my partner. We’ve been together now for seven months and hardly ever spent more than a few hours together. He’s been caring for his mum (who is recently settled in a home) and I have two children who are solely dependent on me, so time together is rare and precious. Being away for forty-eight hours was heavenly. As we sat dueting on our ukuleles with a view devoid of people and filled with grass and sea and sky, the words of Jim Croce’s song, ‘Time in a Bottle’, resonated with a force I’d never felt before:

‘there never seems to be enough time to do the things we wanna do when we find them,

I’ve looked around enough to know, that you’re the one I want to go through time with.’

It struck me on a romantic level; I’ve waited a long time for a man I want to spend time with since the loss of my previous love, Blacksmith Paul, seven years ago. But it also struck me as a writer and a writing coach. Time is something that we talk about a lot in my Monday Motivation sessions and a theme in most one-to-one coaching sessions. As writers, we never seem to have enough time to write the things we want to write. Especially true for me, a lone parent, who gives a lot of my time to other writers and who starts at least six new pieces of writing in workshops each week! It’s so hard to know where to put my focus.

I started one such piece in a workshop this week, inspired by the Jim Croce song, which was part of the inspirational workshop playlist I made. A time-poor single mother, finds herself in a strange old shop filled with bottles. You can buy anything in this shop: self-confidence, love, belief, time. She just wants time. If there were more time in the day, she could have it all - she could be good mum and a great friend. She could have a love life and a social life. She could eat organic food and shop only at the refill store. She could go hiking and swimming and do yoga. She could be fit and healthy and happy and fulfilled. She could write that book….‘How much time do you want?’ the wizardy shopkeeper asks. ‘How much is enough?’ she wonders. Is there ever enough? I suspect not.

I think about time a lot, as a writer and as a human being. Having experienced a lot of early loss, I’m eternally conscious of ‘times winged chariot’ nipping at my heels. I learned through grief, that anything precious can be lost at any moment. It helps me to cherish and appreciate the present moment. The downside is that it makes me anxious and has me asking ‘are you ok?’ several times a day. But it also means I say ‘I love you’ and appreciate people more than most. In grief I learned to fill my time (where possible), only with things that bring me joy. In those dark days when I just wanted to die myself, I had to turn towards the things that made me feel better and away from anything that depleted me. It’s an impulse that can see me dashing to a reservoir for a swim at 9.30pm because the sky is just too beautiful and the urge to swim is too strong to ignore. It’s also the reason I leave my tax return until the last possible moment and watch my beautiful house crumble around me. There’s never a time when I want to do boring jobs.

I’m incredibly privileged, I know, that my family background has allowed me to pursue a career that I love and that I can choose, to some degree, how I spend my working hours. Conversely, my family circumstances, have also made my life very difficult. Parenting two children with complex needs on my own, with my own health issues and without the support of a partner or grandparents has been incredibly tough, especially adding in huge heaps of grief, stress and trauma. I know that I haven’t achieved what I could have done as a writer because of the personal challenges I’ve had and because of the fact that I have given so much of my energy to supporting other writers. But I love my children and I love my work. They bring me such joy. As one of my writers said in Monday Motivation: ‘but what you do for other people is much more valuable than writing your own book.’ She’s right. I haven’t prioritised my own writing because it’s obviously not as important to me as the other things I do. I do want to finish that book though.

We think of time as a linear and measurable concept, something that can be broken down into chunks. It helps us to organise our days and can be useful, as writers, who need to identify the blocks of time we have available for writing. It’s incredibly valuable to break down our time and see where we fritter it away (ten hours a week on Twitter anyone?) But we all know that time is more complex than that. Time goes fast when you’re having fun, they say. It sure as hell goes fast when you’re older and aware of your own mortality. I remember reading an article about the Greek concepts of ‘kairos’ and ‘chronos’ when I was mired in parenting young children. It helped me to make sense of the complexity of the experience: the utter wonder of it (kairos) somehow coexisting alongside the tedium and monotony (chronos) of the passing time. I often say of parenting (probably not an original thought) that the days are long but the years go fast. My kids are teenagers now and I find myself both wishing their childhoods away so that I can embrace my freedom, and panicking that they’re slipping through my fingers and about to leave home. Being a human is hard isn’t it?

I’m approaching the summer holidays now. That’s filled with paradoxes too. Entertaining two kids for six weeks is not easy. Coming up with holiday plans that suit our different needs is tricky. Luckily, I can afford to take us away but it’s not exactly a rest for me, organising and paying for everything and feeding people all day long. But it is a break and a change and we all know what people say about change and rest. I’m looking forward to being off-schedule, and the benefit of teenagers is that they sleep in, so I’ll have the chance to write in the early mornings. Hopefully I’ll get draft three done. Like all of us, I need to identify the time I have available for writing and make the best of use of it. And I need to decide what and who to prioritise. For me that’s my children, my partner, the good friends who have stood by me through thick and thin and my writing community. It’s also my health which has been badly affected by the truama I’ve been through in recent years. I’m employing people now to free myself from some of the admin tasks that have taken over since The Writers Workshop grew. And I’m determined to switch off from social media. There’s no way all of that doom-scrolling is enhancing my life!

I keep reading about ‘glimmers’. It’s the new mindfulness buzzword. Those little moments of joy, when time slows down if you stop and appreciate them. Life will always be filled with tricky things and there will never be enough time. But we can prioritise the things that are important and take time to appreciate those wonderful kairos moments. I hope you get some writing done this summer and I hope you can revel in that indulgence. I hope you can spend your time doing more of what you love and that you can stop to smell the petrichor (which is what I can smell right now).

I started with a song so I’ll end with a poem by Mary Oliver which has been hovering like a butterfly in my mind while I wrote this rambling piece. I just looked it up and it’s aptly called, The Summer Day. Who knew? I’m not sure I’ve ever read the whole thing. I’ve just known the last two lines, which I’ll leave you with:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

Have the best summer you can.