Time Management

I want to thank Eric Buchanan for his comment on my last post. His advice on time management sounds really good, also his advice on exercise.

When I wrote the post, I was flying west to attend a memorial gathering for a cousin, who died quite suddenly in March of cancer which was diagnosed three or four weeks before she died. Until then, she seemed healthy, though -- looking back -- there may have been tiny, misunderstood warning signs.

In any case, a friend of my cousin played several songs at the gathering. One was Paul Simon's "Feeling Groovy," which is staying with me. "Slow down, you move too fast; you've got to make the morning last..."

I think for me one element in managing time better is to slow down and do things more mindfully, rather than alternating between procrastinating and hurrying. Do what I really want to do seriously and in a timely fashion, like right now, and don't do the rest. It's a combination of the Zen admonition -- "cut wood and draw water" -- and the Prairie Home Companion admonition -- "do what needs to be done."

I think my role here at the blog is to talk about writing from the point of view of an older writer and from the point of view of someone who has never made a living at writing. Over the years, I have gained a modest reputation and almost no money. Has it been worth it?

I would feel a lot of worse about my life, if I hadn't written.

So I am going to talk about writing as a life style, rather than a professional career, and as part of my entire life.

Why does one write? archie the cockroach said "expression is the need of my soul," and that is a pretty good answer.

I write to understand life and to make something that is interesting and valuable and uniquely mine. I have always hated the line, "everyone is replaceable." When I die, I want there to be a Eleanor shaped hole in the universe, a void that no one else can fill, except maybe a thoughtful lizard-like green matriarch on a planet in a far distant star system, who will pick up a stylus and begin to compose stories about verb tenses or the names of numbers...