Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal: Successful time-management

It's a matter of how you define success

By James Knudsen

Saturday, December 21, 2013, at around 9:11 in the morning here on the West Coast, the earth began to rock back toward vertical on its way to the summer solstice six months from now. My time has begun. The time when the days get longer with every tick of the clock. Short days are for ants and I'm not an ant. I'm a grasshopper, I need the warm days of summer to properly fiddle away the time.
    Managing time has never been my strongest suit. Not to be confused with punctuality. I can and do get places on time. But making good use of minutes, days, years, lifetime...I don't think I do that very well. A lack of maturity perhaps? The old saying about actors is, “We're never young and we never grow old.” That certainly rings true. It explains why my wish as a seven-year-old was to never grow up. Alas, the wish-granting powers of a chicken's wishbone are severely limited. I grew up and too soon. I spent many years after high school playing roles for which I was ill-suited. Marine, sales clerk, mechanic, sales clerk, rental car agent...that's just another sales clerk. Years spent trying to do something I would never be good at. Spending time like it was a renewable resource.
    But sometime in my thirties I realized that, the first 30 years having been a wash, I'd need more time and resolved to view my life in thirds. I set myself the goal of living to be 90. It still seems like a reasonable goal. The thing is, I passed the half-way point more than three years ago and I'm still going about things the way I always did, as though I have all the time in the world.
    Now, it could be that I haven't reached the half-way point. Maybe I'm due to live longer than 90 years. Now I'm up to 96, pretty soon 98.

Could also be that I'm thinking about this in entirely the wrong way. I'm thinking about it as though we humans were like a grandfather clock with a pendulum that swings back and forth in a perfectly prescibed arc, just so to the left and exactly so to the right. But it doesn't feel that way. I keep waiting, looking, listening, sitting perfectly still to see if I can feel my internal clock reverse direction. Yet another poor use of time.
    It turns out my pendulum metaphor doesn't work so well for people. I suppose there is someone who's life path has been perfectly linear, but I don't think I've met them. Back when I knew everything I was certain I'd met such people. Now I know better, which is better than knowing everything.
    My voice teacher has a little piece of paper that describes success in terms of what people think it looks like versus what it really looks like.

And in that doodle Newton's perfectly rational world of action and reaction is replaced by the chaos of quarks and string theory. And given that Algebra I proved too much for me the first, second, and third time I took the class, elementary physics and quantum mechanics will remain beyond my grasp.^* But that squiggly line certainly seems like something I can accomplish. Chaos is where I am most at home, or my home is where there is the most chaos. (Is there any difference between those?) And yet the clock and its rhythm is comforting. But its routine I'll never be able to follow.
    My own swing through the grandfather clock of life has been anything but prescribed and orderly. I will claim credit for valiant efforts to make it so. But the periods of orderly arcing through time have too often been interrupted by the crash of the pendulum swinging wildly in another plane and smashing the glass. It's an old clock. It was probably old when I got it.
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Copyright © 2013 by James Knudsen
* Reading a theatre professor's musings about higher math is a colossal waste of time.

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