Finding time

Finding time

I’ve tried a lot to write here in the last nine months. Or possibly I’ve only thought about writing here. It’s hard to know because time has felt both stretched and compressed, unclockable and relentless. And it’s often difficult to tell the difference between things I’ve been meaning to do and things I’ve done. But I turned in final grades for this module, and I can imagine breathing again, so I sat down just now to write a thing.

Narrating my process as it happens (a thing I tell my students readers almost never want), I will say that five minutes ago, I idly looked into my posts folder because I was not really happy with that opening up there, and I thought perhaps I’d save that start for something else, and start anew. (What I really want to talk about is the podcast assignment my students just completed, and how inspiring their work was.) But in my folder, I found no fewer than ten drafts of posts that I started in the past year — some of them very nearly complete — and abandoned. And now I can’t stop thinking about all that abandoned work.

TEN POSTS WORTH.

The first one I looked at needs at most three more sentences, ones that already exist in a drafty notes-to-self form right there. And yet it sits there, unpublished. Presumably because of time, although I don’t think it would take me more than five minutes to finish it.

These posts look like a series of rooms someone has run out of hastily because of a disaster. In a sense, that’s exactly what they are. Rooms full of words abandoned because something more urgent came up: meetings to attend, or emails to answer, or forms to fill out, or students to support, or papers to grade, or classes to prep, or zoom to wrestle with, or colleagues to support, or workshops to prepare, or feedback to write, or assessments to draft, or children to support, or dogs to feed, or meals to cook, or, or, or, or, or.

I make that list quickly, without much thought, and I realize several things: first, none of those things are about me; second, even my family comes at the end of the list; third, this year has been one of relentless meetings and adherence to my calendar, which is ironic given that I feel like I usually have no idea what day of the week it is.

And so, as I begin to move towards a sabbatical that starts June 1, I think the first thing I will do is look back at this graveyard of drafts that represents my efforts at trying to think coherently through ANYTHING in the last year, and see if any of them are worth resurrecting. I’m going to think of it as a process of trying to reclaim my time.

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