We’re running out of time, or time is running out on us. I have a problem with boundaries – not with interpersonal boundaries, but with perceiving divisions in a continuum. How do you decide where a river ends and the ocean begins? How can you tell the difference between a minute and a lifetime?
Like many people I sometimes find it helpful to work towards a deadline. This is, I am coming to realize, less about creating a sense of urgency than it is about creating a sense of quantity. When time is limited it is precious, when it is precious it must be budgeted – without any concept of deadline, it becomes impossible to evaluate what’s worth spending time on, what’s worth caring about. At many points in the past, when I found myself confronted by these issues, I would choose defiance against time’s ultimate authority: “It will take however long it takes” I’d declare, with no perception of how long that might be, and once again I’d push it out of mind, pretend once more that I didn’t belong in time’s domain, wasn’t a tenant in its crumbling building.
Defiance is an approach that is frequently more narratively pleasing than it is pragmatic. At some point negotiations have to start – we call this the “bargaining” phase. The costs of doing things “properly” – rather than quickly, effectively, efficiently – begin to become apparent. Wheels that seemed worth reinventing begin to appear actually perfectly satisfactorily circular and, like in figure drawing, the overall impression and the silhouette comes to be more important than the fine details.
Meanwhile, at the other side of the spectrum of respect for time’s power, obsessing over every second, attempting to optimize every moment, quickly becomes a problem as well. The anxiety over time well spent comes to be quite a time-consuming hobby in its own right, and often quite paradoxically it begins to eat away at ones ability to actually utilize these acknowledged precious moments.
I find myself caught between these twin sentinels, always lying, always telling the truth. I have to slow down and hurry up, be recklessly cautious, calculatingly intuitive, minimalistically outrageous. It is small surprise that most large creative projects are collaborative – division of labor is valuable to be sure, but perhaps equally valuable is the division of perspective, of having one person with an eye on the clock, another with an eye on the purse strings, and yet another with an eye on the art itself. That adds up to three eyes, which is more than most folks have readily available. Us lonely solo artists hang in there just as well as we can manage, trying to see from multiple perspectives at once, using every smoke and mirror we can find along the way.