I am, heaven help me, attempting to write a novel. It has no deadline because no one is asking for it. Months ago, I set it down. It got hard, and I got busy. To the hate shelf it went.
A couple of weeks ago, I started feeling resistance around basically all of my work, gentle at first and then becoming properly recalcitrant. My brain allowed me to work on external deadline-driven things, but any discretionary projects were not funded with focus or attention.
As I round out my fourth decade living with this particular brain, I knew that it was telling me I was ignoring a project that it thought needed to come off the shelf. I even had a shrewd idea of which project it was calling for.
And still, I dragged my feet.
The last time I touched that project, it was hard. Impossible-level hard. I was working through a set of exercises developed by Kristin Oakley, and I did not have the answers. I had started working through those exercises in the first place because I was completely stuck and had no idea how to move in any direction, let alone forward.
So I quit, for a time.
Last week, my internal mulishness having reached an unbearable level, I gave in and dug that project out. I opened up the folio where I store all of my notes and the electronic files that contain its progress thus far, looked at all of it, and started plodding along exactly where I left off: Kristin Oakley's dratted exercises.
Except this time I am not plodding.
I opened a new document and began again. Answers flow to questions that, a year ago, made me want to pull a blanket over my head and play hide-and-seek from my work.
In a way, that is exactly what I did. And, perhaps ironically, it seems like that was the right choice to move forward.
Work at a Natural Pace
Recently, I read Cal Newport's latest book, Slow Productivity. One of the things he exhorts his readers to do is “work at a natural pace.” Somehow, this admonishment feels both obvious and revolutionary.
We use a lot of industrial or mechanical metaphors to think about how our world works. The sun rises “like clockwork,” but the sun is a terrible timekeeper by any standard1—the length of days waxes and wanes.
If my watch did that, I'd take it in for repair.
My watch is a mechanical system devised by man for convenience. We divide days into hours, hours into minutes, minutes into seconds. It allows scientists to share a common understanding of how long various processes take. It lets hundreds of people all converge at once to take the same train, to arrange rides from their stop to their destination.
As value is real, but money is something that only works because we all agree to it, time is real, but hours, minutes, and seconds only have meaning because we agree that they have meaning.
A day is a natural unit. A week is not. A month is not, though the moon's light waxes and wanes on its own regular cycle. A season is. A year is. A lifetime is.
Having lived your entire life as a human, you are aware already that each day is not created equal. The external circumstances change (that terrible timekeeper, the sun, is to blame), our own circumstances change from getting a night of good vs. poor sleep to the massive disruptions of huge transitions or projects that fill our days, or not.
And yet, when we apportion our work, we do so with an implicit assumption that each day adheres to some standard. We pretend that an hour of work is an hour of work, that a day is a day is a day. Yet anyone who has tried to do anything after spending the night with a screaming child understands that this is, at the most fundamental level, a complete and total delusion.
And yet we plan as though it were the truth.
We feel ourselves called to hibernate as the sun stays low in the sky and only graces us briefly. We feel ourselves called to be outside in the breeze as the sun returns and to bask in its rays until late evening when it gives us the opportunity.
And yet we set our morning alarm for the same time, regardless of season. Our bodies may well desire something different, but they have long since learned that we do not often listen to, let alone heed, their requests.
A Monday is a Monday, a Sunday is a Sunday, neither real except for our all agreeing that they are.
As with our clocks, we have standardized our days, our weeks, our months, our years. And as noon no longer means “the time when the sun is directly overhead,” our larger rhythms, too, have been divorced from our fundamental nature.
Most projects do not have the great luxury of being able to take their own time. They are bound by deadlines and expectations, by the implacable demands of clocks and calendars and keeping these heaving, unwieldy systems running.
That exact property that we treat as indulgent luxury is necessity for many things. A tomato shipped green and forced to ripen by a grocer will never have the sweetness of fruit allowed to follow its own timetable, allowed to ripen on the vine and be picked and eaten while still covered in fuzz and warm from the sun.
We are so divorced from this reality that I would reckon most people don't even realize that tomatoes are fuzzy, before they become objects of commerce.
We are so divorced from this reality that I would further reckon that most people would struggle to come up with a single instance of a large project they had that was allowed to move at its own pace, to ripen in its own time.
And as with the tomatoes, many projects need that time. Our creative mulch needs time to compost, to break down and recombine, to reclaim ideas for fodder, and to nurture new ones as they emerge.
(I say this now as a writer, as a painter, but my past life was in engineering and science. I speak directly to these fields as well—even though they are the ones who gave us the wretched clocks in the first place.)
To keep up with our world as it is built, we must do certain things on certain timelines, whether it makes sense or not.
But do not despair if you set things down, if you take breaks—even long ones. All living things need some form of dormancy; neither we nor our work are an exception.
While some plants don't survive a winter, many more come back reinvigorated in spring. So it goes with our work as well.
“Standard,” my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary tells me, implies “a thing serving as a recognized example or principle to which others conform or should conform or by which the accuracy or quality of others is judged.” This strikes me as needlessly stringent when applied to the ebb and flow of living things.