Another year is winding down—or winding up—or not winding at all, depending on how you appreciate time. When you stay at home and write, time as measured in the typical fashion—days of the week, for example – begin to lose meaning. You have a deadline, yes, but time is your own, to use for good or ill, and there is no one else to say otherwise. Time changes, then, based on your priorities. Word counts matter more than minutes. Hours until you leave work do not exist. You work until you lose steam, until you get too hungry or tired or wired to continue. Work is time, time is work, you are work, you are time—your own time, your own clock, which is unique and not wound by the rest of the world—and wow, what a way to live. Precarious, on the edge—because time is a rule made by others, but when you make your own time, your own rules, all you have is yourself, which is a peculiar kind of isolation—and wonderfully, wildly, freeing. Oh, what a life.
So what am I saying? Make your own rules this year. Make your own time, even if it is in fragments. Give yourself a new appreciation for the passage of your life and how you wish to live it. All you have is now. The past is gone, the future a dream. But here, this moment, is yours for the taking, and if every moment has meaning, if every moment is yours and yours alone, you have the power and responsibility to create a personal destiny that is, at the end of things, the perfect culmination of every precious moment of your precious life, a life that is used to its full potential, without regret, a life that is less ordinary, that is lived by you, by your rules, and no one else’s.
Joseph Campbell gets into this. He’s got words to say:
Breaking out
is following your bliss pattern,
quitting the old place,
starting your hero journey,
following your bliss.
If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
When we hang onto any form,
we are in danger of putrefaction.
Hell is life drying up.
Don’t dry up, folks. I never ever met a husk or a raisin in the sun that knew how to have a good time. They got no legs to stand on.
And on that note, Happy New Year!