Daily Nourishment for May 27: Time as a Generous Companion
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 45 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
“Rather than viewing time as a scarce resource to manage, we can experience it as a generous companion in our creative journey.”
-Charlotte Donlon, Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life
Pause.
Take six deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale while looking at The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali.
Prompt.
“Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once ‘time’ and ‘life’ had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask—that is, to use the same portion of time for two things at once, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the first to notice: ‘One thinks with a watch in one’s hand,’ he complained in an 1887 essay, ‘even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.’
And it becomes a lot more intuitive to project your thoughts about your life into an imagined future, leaving you anxiously wondering if things will unfold as you want them to. Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed…
“The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the way.’”
-Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Practice.
Set a timer for 10 minutes and write in response to the image and quotes above and the questions and statements below.
Write a few lines of prose or poetry imagining what it could look like to belong to time and to view time as a generous companion in your creative process.
How can knowing the limitations of time and your unending to-do list be motivation to write or motivation to skip writing?
How can you view time and belong to time in ways that lead to freedom and expansiveness instead of worry and overwhelm?
Want More?
Read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life.
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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