Time Has Come Today
Time: Who knows where the time goes, asks one song. The days dwindle down, no time for the waiting game, goes another. I don’t have the time to explain that to you, says my wife, but it would only take the same amount of time as her telling me she hasn’t the time.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time, our most precious, essential, and mostly squandered commodity. Except perhaps for energy, which is never lost like the minutes, days, years are. And as one grows older, it seems time grows shorter and the yearning for more grows ever greater.
Tick. Tock. The featured image above was taken in 1973. I’m in Santa Rosa, California, probably writing a college paper. Maybe it’s about James Joyce’s Ulysses, or maybe it’s a short story. Could time be classified beside energy as an equally precious, even endangered, shortage? Has the computer and the plethora of information it spews shortened our available time? (Without a doubt.)
Time to talk about cabbages and kings, the walrus said. My time is measured in information increments: how long will it take me to write, to revise, to post, to perform yet another software update or fix the latest unwanted app “feature” foisted on me. TMI. TMI. I’ve become an information tactician, and most of it isn’t fun. I need more time to think. Time to feel. Time to play, to better connect with people.
But that said, I’ve loved reviewing books and writing personal blogs for you here for these past four or five years. I created “My Brain on Grape-Nuts” and “Saturday Book Review” for you, solely for the joy of sharing. Tomorrow is my birthday, and my gift to myself is recouping the time it takes to write, edit, illustrate and post these blogs – on average, two to three hours each – so I can spend some tick-tock and burn some energy on other writing interests.
My personal oeuvre stands at 19 books; I need the time to write number 20, the fourth and final novel in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers series, which I’ll be writing on the machine in the photo below. I want to devote more – and higher quality – time to Fictional Café and my baristas. I want to spend more of my “free time” bicycling and in my woodworking shop.
So, as the title of one of my most favorite musical pieces (so much more than just a song!) says, “Time Has Come Today.” I won’t desert you; I’ll probably feel the urge to write a blog to you once in a while, as the spirit moves me, when I have the ticks and tocks. But no more demanding weekly deadlines (although I truly do have the greatest respect for a deadline).
Thank you for being a subscriber. I hope I’ve added something of value to your life. Writing these hundreds of blogs has definitely added new dimensions to my own.
