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August 09, 2005
The Gift of Time
As frustrating as having no specific future plans is for me, I am discovering something wonderful about just having time to putter. I am enjoying being able to begin a project, set it aside to think about, and then come back to it with a solution without having to worry about 1) whether anyone else will like it and 2) needing to get it done NOW.
I often worry about how much I need to get done in a given day/week/month, and I find that this worry tends to pretty consistently trigger the response of me sitting on the couch reading something escapist. I had hoped that graduate school would help me to solve that problem, and in a way it has, because I have discovered new things I enjoy and want to work on/with/explore. It also showed me how useful deadlines were and how very necessary escapism can be. Sometimes we do just need to sit down on the couch with a good book and forget about the world for a little while.
Of course, I worried that once school was done, if I didn't have anything "to do" with my time I would sit on the couch and read novels forever. Fortunately, I have found that if I just choose to do one small thing, I can generally get such a huge feeling of achievement out of it that I can move on to doing something else. I am also learning, thanks to this gift of time, that it is okay to take time to work on a project. I can complete a step, and that is just as valuable as actually finishing the whole thing. Because at the end of the day, I am one step closer to finished.
But at the same time, I am beginning to realize how very necessary slowing my life down is for my sanity and my work as an artist. The above photograph is of an Eeyore snowglobe on my desk. I used it to hold up the Henry Irving quotation until I could find a place for it on my wall. Only I've never had the time to do that. As I was sitting at my computer last week, I noticed the quotation. And then I noticed that I could see some words through the globe. And because I had nothing pressing to work on/avoid, I took the time to take a couple of pictures of it.
I had the time to be still and begin to notice things again. Who knows whether I would ever have seen the words in that bubble of glass and water, whether I would ever have seen the light as it bounced off the page and bent through the snowglobe if I was still frantically and constantly busy with "work" and school. But now I have the time to notice these things and time to think about them.
In the end, I don't think rushing about, always doing something, suits me as an artist. If my work is about observing the world around me, thinking about how it all fits together and then voicing those thoughts and observations in ways that make other people think and observe, I need to have time for both the noticing and the considering. And now, in this teeny, backwards, smokey university town, thanks to my David's desire to pursue his own artistic goals, I have that gift of time.
Posted by sally at August 9, 2005 11:18 AM
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