Nine times out of ten, it’s not a mark against your discipline, your day-planning, or your organizational skills. It’s proof of the trainwreck your life is. The kind you can’t look away from.
It’s the lunch you rush to pack, but didn’t grab because you’re running late again. The gas you didn’t remember you still need. The dropping off and the picking up. The picking up and the dropping off again. The emails, the meetings, the meetings that should have been emails. The emails about meetings about emails that were unnecessary before ever pressing send. It’s the phone calls, the deadlines, the due-dates, the bills. The weakened bridges. The faulty switches. A boiler explosion. A mechanical failure. A head-on collision. The bodies, the carnage, the severed limbs.
Ok, so it’s not as bad as a literal “trainwreck”. But, nine times out of ten it's ugly. It’s painful. It’s not pretty. It’s not nothing. Believe me.
For most of your adult life you've never had more than an hour of dedicated time for writing or creating. That's it. That's all there's ever been. That's all you get. Nine times out of ten, that’s all there is. It’s not great, but it’s not nothing, if you ask me.
At a godforsaken hour, you turn the alarm off, you turn the light on. You’re agnostic about most things. That’s all anyone can be. If asked, you’d say you don’t believe in god, but who knows for sure? Who’s to say? Absolute knowledge is untenable. Nothing is concrete, not even Concrete. But, if there’s one thing you do know. One thing you’re sure of. One thing you can say with absolute certainty. It's that if there is a god, then nine times out of time he forsakes anything at or before 5am.
Regardless of the theological implications, you get up before the sun's up and you write. You make things, first thing.
Ok, so not “first thing”.
There are other things that get your immediate attention before you can give your groggy efforts to the written word. You walk the dog. You make coffee. Nine times out of ten, no one's creative practice benefits from cleaning up dog shit. And, even though you switched to decaf in the morning, you still believe in the placebo effect. It may not be caffeinated, but it’s not nothing in my opinion, and right afterwards you can start typing keys.
Ok, so not “right afterwards”.
You learned a long time ago that you can't fill a page if you come to it empty. So, before you get started, you meditate, you read. It happens like this everyday. Like clockwork. Nine times out of ten. Without fail. You go to your desk when you’re done and begin the only creating you’ll do today. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. It's something that no one can take away.
Ok, so it’s not “the only creating you’ll do”.
Nine times out of ten there are scraps and fragments of writing and making that happen throughout the day. There's a document open on your desktop at work. Evernote on a separate tab. A pocket notebook ready at hand. Sometimes you catch a few words, a sentence, a few lines. Sometimes you’ll write a little more in the evenings if it strikes you. If you feel prompted or prodded. "Inspired", is what the romantics might like to call it, but it's rare that it's something so grand.
More often than not, it's just a thought. One that seems worth writing down, worth saving, worth capturing. Never mind the fact that they usually get thrown away. But, it’s not nothing. It’s part of the process. Part of the larger project. “The waste paper basket is your friend”, Margaret Atwood would say.
It doesn’t make you a productivity expert. It won’t make you less of a mess. But, nine times out of ten it makes you minimalist with your time as well as with your things. "Living well means spending more time on things that matter”, Mark Manson says. “Living poorly means spending more time on things that don’t”. Nine times out of ten the trick is “knowing the difference." We’d call that wisdom. Most days we’re just trying to fail better at the ways we spend our days.
Your time is the contents of a freight car overturned. A Goods Waggon gone off the rails. You ransack what you can until the authorities come to clear the scene. It's not perfect. It's not what you’d prefer. But, it's not nothing. You know you can make it work.
You may only get an hour, and sometimes a little extra, but the words know where to find you. They always know where you'll be. It might be a cliche to say it, but even cliches can tell the truth. Nine times out of ten, you can be damn sure that where there's a will, there’s a fucking way.
It's not nothing. It’s something. Some days, it’s everything.
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