Friday I’m In Love: Time
Let’s get a little abstract.
Over the last few months, we’ve been rewatching Parks & Rec with our two boys. I’m sure you’re familiar with the show, but allow me to remind you that there’s a running joke about Ron Swanson holding down multiple labor-intensive jobs when he was way too young to be working. His first job was at a sheet metal factory at age nine—and within two weeks he was running the floor. The other night, we watch an episode late in Season 6 where Ron talks about driving to the prom at age 12 and then going to work an overnight shift at the saw mill. His perspective on child labor laws is, let’s say, unfavorable.
When I was a teenager, I used to joke/complain that Andersons didn’t go on vacation—we just went to work at someone else’s house. If we went to my grandparents’ home, it was not unreasonable to be expected to till the garden or mow the lawn, or pick fruit in the orchard, or pull weeds down at my grandfather’s law office. If we took a trip to visit my mom’s brothers in Texas, there was a good chance that we’d replace some siding or that someone would pull a U-Haul trailer a few thousand miles, towing an old wood-burning stove that needed to be installed in a relative’s home.
I landed my first official job when I was 14. Our back-alley neighbor was a dentist and he needed someone to clean his office. It took about six hours every Saturday and I got paid $25 per week. From there, things only got weirder. I worked at McDonald’s (in Taft, CA working at McDonald’s was a solidly middle-class move), I spent a summer slinging mud for a brick mason in Moab, UT. I washed tow trucks and sand-blasted old car parts. I loaded trucks at a Frito-Lay warehouse. I cleaned carpets. I made mortgage refinancing phone calls from some dude’s guest room. I was a teacher’s assistant at an alternative high school. I fact-checked a book about family fun in Utah. I worked the graveyard shift at Gold’s Gym. I serviced vending machines.
And then I started my career.
More or less, I’ve been either working or studying (often both) for the last 28 years. I’ve also gotten married, added three kids, picked up a mortgage, and tried to be a responsible participant in the community. It’s been a busy three decades. A good three decades, but there hasn’t been a lot of time spent doing nothing for extended periods of time. There have been vacations and escapes, of course. And I’ve gotten better at unplugging and staying present. But work has always hung in the air like an Oregon drizzle—it might not soak you, but you’re definitely getting wet.
What I’m about to say now comes with a hefty dose of privilege, probably more than I realize. That’s the way privilege works, right? There’s always a little more lurking in the places you’d never expect. Especially when you’re white (me), male (me), straight (me), Christian (me), middle-class (me), etc. etc. etc. For someone like me—even unemployment can arrive threaded with privilege. I stopped working at Struck at the end of 2018. I don’t yet have another job. In short, my employment status is unresolved. My financial future is uncertain at best. But I’m time-rich. And that is a privilege—an uneasy privilege, but a privilege nonetheless.
(A short, but important aside: It’s well-documented that time poverty has a far larger impact on women than on men. Women carry more of the domestic workload than their male partners, they’re often responsible for more of the administrative work associated with kids and schools, etc. No matter how much we think we’ve improved, we partners/husbands/fathers have got to be better at carrying the often unnoticed weight that women carry daily.)
Time affluence, if you’ll let it in, if you’ll use it to meditate and explore, carries consequences. It forces reconciliation of the deficits that have accrued over the years. Instead of running to hop on another plane or scooting into another client meeting, I now have to acknowledge that I’ve spent too much time away from the people I love the most. I‘ve had to reckon with the bad eating habits and inactivity that packed an extra 50lbs onto my frame. I can no longer pretend that I don’t have the time to read or the time to write or the time to make dinner or the time to fold the laundry or the time to wrestle before bed-time or the time to think about things that make me happy.
Having time is not easy. We’re not conditioned for it. I feel guilty about the time I have. I’m not sure how to talk to neighbors when they point out that I’m home awfully early. I’m scared about the mortgage. I spend too much time on LinkedIn and Zip Recruiter.
I’m learning to give time back to myself, though, to value the time that is spent in the service of my soul. That’s something, isn’t it? I was so good at attaching value the time spent at work, in a job, on the road, with a client, in the office, on the phone, under the gun… But it meant being terrible at valuing the time spent with a book, in my thoughts, next to my wife, with my kids, in a spin class, watching a movie, listening to records.
For now, I have that time. I’m sure it will disappear again. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe this is something I won’t be willing to sacrifice. Maybe Captain Fantastic is about to be unleashed on my family and they don’t even know he’s coming for them. Or maybe I’ll get another job and I’ll be more mindful. I’ll reclaim some time and evolve. It’s all unresolved. It’s all uncertain.
I warned you that we’d be getting a little abstract this week. I hope that’s okay every now and again. Next week, I’m sure I’ll be back to writing about food or the new Cherry Glazerr record (it’s a-ma-zing!). But for now, I have the time to be abstract. And I love it.
Every Friday I share something I love. Usually, it’s a new infatuation. Occasionally, it’s something else. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for the theme song, Phoebe Bridgers!
