Learning to enjoy the luxury of time
Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 12:57AM Funny how you spend your life longing for time to do the things you love and then, when you have it - unexpectedly, abundantly - it’s hard to enjoy.
I am one of the fortunate ones still employed and able to work from home. Even so, in lock down, there is a lot more time. There are two hours each day when I’m not commuting. We can’t have people around, so the house stays clean. We can’t go out. All appointments are cancelled. Sunday morning devoid of church and the associated travel and socialising, is yawningly empty.
In ordinary times, the activities I long for more time to indulge in are reading, walking, writing and meditating. I wouldn’t mind taking up the piano again too. Not to mention getting more sleep. All solitary activities – perfect for a time of plague. But I find myself beset with a kind of lassitude that means it’s hard for me to revel in less busyness the way I would like to.
I suspect there are several reasons for this.
Things become precious when they are a rare commodity. In our normal life, time is valuable. When we have plenty, it loses its lustre.
Many of us are addicted to speed, efficiency, productivity, and we are being forced to go cold turkey on filling every moment with useful and worthwhile activity.
There’s a kind of survivor’s guilt. Watching the daily horror of overfull hospitals, endless welfare queues, soaring domestic violence statistics and other abominations, it’s hard not to feel bad about still having a roof over my head, paid work, food in the fridge. And there’s another kind of guilt too: as I contemplate indulging in activities I love, my Presbyterian forebears are on my shoulder, castigating me for sloth.
Mostly, though, it’s the tangible sense of dread and anxiety that accompanies uncertainty, one of the emotions human beings find most enervating. And the dread is universal. During our recent bushfire summer, I felt as though the pain of the whole country – humanity, flora and fauna – was weighing me down. There was literal smoke and metaphoric shock and despair in the very air we breathed. Coronavirus has a still vaster scope, with the grief and fear of every nation pressing upon us.
My hope, under this new dispensation, is to learn as much as I can about living with uncertainty and waiting with grace and compassion. And maybe even to relax into enjoying the extra time we have suddenly been given.
This was published in The Melbourne Age on 15 April 2020
Reader Comments (2)
Well stated! I feel as though I am sleepwalking these days and I have plenty of interesting things to do. It's difficult to move away from the computer and all of its shiny mindlessness.
Thankyou Clare. I am missing the footy, golf and congregational gathering but feeling the pain of those suffering from the virus. Zoom has been a wonderful discovery to keep in touch with friends and family but what is more, I am deeply appreciating the silence and solitude which we extraverts normally find difficult.