Out Of Time

I know it’s hard to find the time to write some days what with all you have to do. Time, after all, is a limited resource, and if you spend an hour doing this thing you can’t spend it doing another thing. And I know sometimes you look up and think, “I’m not getting any younger.” Once you really become aware of that, that you’re changing with time, that you’ve watched seasons roll by and can see the difference in the mirror, that your children are growing up so fast, it’s hard to forget it. You can start believing time is precious, that you must spend it wisely, that wasting it is like pouring your very life down some eternal drain.

And then there’s writing, which seems to function outside of time. Yes, you have perhaps carved out an hour or two from your day, that you may even have set a little alarm so you won’t forget you must close the laptop and walk the dog or make the kids’ lunches, but when you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole that is a story, time has no meaning. You say you, “lose track of it,” but really you simply stop caring about it because it has no role to play in creativity, measuring as it does the long scroll of the past. You create in the present, in the right now, which is timeless.

It doesn’t seem that way, does it? Because you get up from the desk, and there’s that list of things you have to do, all of them requiring time, which you now have two hours less of. And everything really does keep changing as the calendar flips by. You know it does. You read the news; you’ve seen the buildings come down as more go up. You’ve heard of the new invention that makes the old one obsolete. The changes keep coming, and those very changes remind you of time and how little of it you have.

You know all of this, and yet a small part of you sees writing as an antidote to time’s merciless grind. Perhaps you hold the vain belief that you will write something that will live forever after you’re gone. That’s not what you want. No, you just want to write. Time only measures the changing conditions of the world, the seasons and the night and the day. But a story is born from the imagination, which is unconcerned what has been and cares only about what could be. It is eternal, undimmed from day to day, changeless as it is formless, and to join it is to remember what you really are.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com