Free Time

Most authors I know who are at the beginning of their writing journey struggle to find enough time to write. There are so many demands placed on an adult with a job and a house to keep up and maybe a spouse and some growing children that finding an hour or two five or six days a week seems destined to end in a Sophie’s choice between art and sleep. Writing, after all, is a tree that can take years to bear fruit, whereas dishes, and homework, and bills and all the daily business of being alive and a functioning member of society form an endless harvest from seeds already sown decades ago. In fact, most of what we call our life has been growing around us for so long that it is hard to remember who sowed those seeds in the first place. It is easy to forget and call it reality, the way schools existed before we were fed into them, and our days soon became wed to the weekly rhythms of a song written long before we were born. When I look at life this way, my life feels like something that happened to me, a job handed me at birth that I am made to work until I retire into the grave.

But the writer must accept his freedom. The page is blank and only a conscious exercise of that freedom will fill it. The time to write can be found within the recognition of our inherent and persistent freedom. My days have always been a perfect portrait of what I believed about life. When I believed the world was divided into have and have-nots, into the servant and the served, my days were spent toiling to write books to set me free from a life of indentured servitude in a job for which I had willingly applied and willingly worked for seventeen years.

Somewhere in all that toiling I began to see my writing as in service to life, and the clear division between haves and have-nots became increasingly blurry. I eventually discovered I did not need that job anymore, and soon my days were no longer divided between what I wished for and what I had. Time was mine whether I wanted it or not, and I had exactly as much of it as everyone else on the planet.