Lost and Found

What should we do with this gift of time?

We treat our time as infinite. Maybe not at the surface; if you asked me if I will die some day, I would say, “Of course”. Yet my behaviors often convey the opposite: I frivol away days checking email, hopping on Twitter, looking for that next new thing to capture my attention. We call ourselves busy, largely of our own design.

Now that time may seem more abundant, how should we choose to spend it? Much the same as before the pandemic? Just as nature abhors a vacuum, people tend to fill there days with what is available and interesting. 

How we allocate our attention and energies is evidence of our beliefs and values. People devote their time to what feels important, and right. They may engage in behaviors they know at some level is less than healthy but do so anyway. If you ask a smoker if they know cigarettes are dangerous, they will mostly likely respond in the affirmative (along with a possible snarky comment, i.e. “What’s it to you?”). 

Yet beliefs can shift. Our current situation has created some conditions for personal renewal. For instance, I have a fence that was ever so slowly falling apart. A picket would pop off and hang off the bottom panel, like a ramp inviting the neighborhood wildlife to jump into our backyard and feast on the new plantings in our raised beds. 

My previous (pre-pandemic) plan was to take on additional work and save enough money from side gigs to pay someone handier than me to fix it. Now that we have little desire to bring strangers onto our property, it has fallen upon me to learn how to rebuild a fence. 

So I took one week’s vacation as a school administrator to develop a plan for educating myself on this process. (It has not been lost on me that I had to request time off from my job in education to become educated in this practical skill.) My neighbor had previously offered to help me get started with the fence repair. So with my drill fully charged, plus the promise of upcoming sunny Wisconsin days, we started.

One of the first things I have learned during this process has nothing to do with fence building. What I realized was how incredibly privileged I am. In the middle of a pandemic, I could afford to take time away from work and devote much of my attention to this project. Millions of people are unemployed. Lines for food pantries stretch around blocks. Essential workers and protestors risk their lives to ensure society sustains and renews itself. 

Prior to the pandemic, fixing the fence was an annoying placeholder on my to-do list, like a pebble in my shoe that I would have been happy to remove without another thought. Now considering my privilege, I see this space as a gift, something given to me more out of luck than any specific thing I have done.

How can we repay this? I have started to a gratitude journal to notice and name all of the things I no longer want to take for granted: Living in a rural area. Curbside food pick up. Handy and friendly neighbors. These little acknowledgements have led to gratitude-in-action: small gifts, such as fresh beignets my wife and daughter made which we ran over to Ed and his wife. 

Another small epiphany is the letting go of small annoyances that used to (and, yes, sometimes still do) get under my skin. For example, the dog barking a block away through part of the night is a reminder that many aspects of life have remained consistent. Seedlings nibbled down by rabbits is motivation to keep going with the fence repair. And really, what does any of it matter in the larger scheme of things?

My perfectionist tendencies have been less than a perfect match for the idle time. Regarding the fence project, my ideal outcome did not involve concessions, such as shortening the posts to reuse the pickets, most of which are still in pretty good shape. I shared with Ed this personal flaw as we lowered one panel to the ground. “Yeah, my wife is like that too. What I say is, ‘Let’s aim for 80% right.’ Can you live with that?” 

Maybe the biggest shift I have made is rethinking this concept of time. Instead of a linear path as our lifetime, I am starting to see our days as buckets, containers that, each day, we can fill with what we desire to put in them. I can look over the top of a bucket and evaluate what is inside. Am I happy with how I spent my time and what I chose to attend to today? If not, what can I fill this bucket with tomorrow?

At this point, it would be easy to start speaking in platitudes or pull up some pithy quote to close this out. No. Instead, I ask: what specifically are we going to do with what we have been given here - a gift - now that the world has slowed down a bit? As we’ve been able to gain our bearings and expand our perspective, what had we lost and recently found? 

Memories, like pictures, fade over time. Any sense of urgency now is largely at the mercy of our future. But not totally. We can build the discipline of sustained attention and devote a little more of a focus on what our true priorities are for our limited days. I won’t say “make the most of them” - again, no platitudes - yet could we at least aim for 80%? What can we live with? The fence will not be perfect, and I want to enjoy the backyard with others. To do otherwise would be ungrateful.

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