“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser
Yesterday I spent the day working at my business. It was a good day, though I left with as much undone as done. That’s normal.
The problem is the stories that kept creeping into my head. Things that need to be written down. Ideas that need recording, even if there are no words to record it. Amorphous blobs of thought. Strings of ideas that meander like one of my favorite rivers. An occasional cannonball that makes everything damp and somewhat annoying but is gone before a guy can even find a towel.
The problem is, of course, time. We all have the same 24 as everyone else, but even without a lot of TV, work and the rest of the necessities of life occupy much of our non-work time, leaving us with precious little discretionary time.
I don’t want to create a universe from stories, but I would like to create one little star, one that wouldn’t be there if I didn’t take the time to write down the stories that spontaneously appear in my brain.
What to do…what to do…
I always wonder about people who work until they’re 104 because they don’t know what they’d do without work to fill their time. Laudable, but spectacularly uncreative. Sure, it’s better to be carried out from your job feet first than spend all your post-retirement life watching game shows and playing 3-par golf on the local pitch and putt.
I love my business, the people I work with in the industry I help keep healthy. But I am missing a few things.
1) Time to write. I hate scrounging for a solid block of time to sit and contemplate the universe while scribbling down whatever flows into my head. I probably have the time, but what I lack is the perspective that it’s totally okay to waste time in such an endeavor. The nagging voice whispers go do something productive.
2) Time to read. Almost as important, I don’t read as much as I would like. I have a shelf on our bookshelves that contains all the books in my queue, ordered by date of procurement from oldest to newest. It’s getting longer, and I am adding books faster than I can read them. And there are some really good books…Florentine history, a few new books fromWendell Berry, a Ross King book on French Impressionism, a new Bill Bryson book, part of a Garrison Keillor snoozer and three books by Canadian author Stephen Leacock. You only become a good writer by being a good reader.
I’m finishing King. Leacock (pictured below) is on deck.
3) Time to think about nothing. Probably the most important of all. Western (particularly American) sentiment is that doing nothing is a waste of time. In part I agree, but I also think that doing something just to keep from doing nothing is just as pathological, maybe more so. The frenetic pace of some people makes me wonder what they’re running from.
I don’t want to be these guys.
My time in Italy taught me the joy of the dolce far niente…the sweetness of doing nothing. Without getting into a philosophical debate, I could argue that the act of choosing to do nothing is in and of itself a value and is therefore doing something. Italians get it. I’ve forgotten it.
They didn’t.
So I guess what it comes down to is that here is no doing or not doing, there is only authoring your life or letting someone else author it for you. Now is the time to dedicate some time to writing. Probably not here as much…gotta finish the manuscript first, the one that looks like moths finished off what the sawed-off shotgun couldn’t. Then I have another book in my head that I need to get out before it goes the way of a brick of mild cheddar left in the back of the fridge.
Respectfully submitted,
Canoelover
I agree whole-heartedly. I’ve never been able to relate to people who say they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they didn’t have jobs. Moreover, not consciously and deliberately doing something is absolutely not the same as truly doing nothing. As your remark about “the stories that kept creeping into my head” suggests, our minds work in ways not fully subject to our willful control. Indeed, many people have testified that their best ideas came to them not when they were actively trying to think about some problem but as they were taking a stroll or going about some mundane task. (Having been educated as a mathematician, I always think of Henri Poincare’s account of how a major idea occurred to him as he was getting on a bus.)
You might enjoy, as I did, Paul Graham’s essay “The top idea in your mind” (http://bit.ly/cRW2jY). Graham argues that where your mind goes when you’re not trying to think about anything in particular is important for creativity and that your circumstances and commitments influence its direction. Obvious enough, I suppose, but his way of putting the matter helped me articulate some of what dismayed me about the prospect of becoming a professor back when I was a postdoctoral fellow.
Speaking of which, it was while I was a postdoc in Madison that I got acquainted with Rutabaga, as did my partner, Tonya Severson. And it’s thanks to her I read this thoughtful post of yours.
Thanks, Ralph… Yeah, Poincare’ getting on a bus…me sitting eating a cookie…same thing. Well, not the same thing because my idea is “I really should move the sock wall at work,” while Henri thought about stuff that would make my head do that topological thing that turns your head inside-out via your ear.
Tonya’s good people. Nicely done. I usually say in such situations “you obviously married above your station.” Modify as necessary, but the sentiment is the same. 🙂
I’ll look up Graham. Sounds like a nice addition to my shelf of crack.
Cheers, DB
Glad to hear the canoe is alive again!!