how will you spend your life?
Practicing choosing, rather than existing
“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I have been thinking about this quote, one I’ve heard many times before, for several days. It’s from Annie Dillard’s terrific book on writing, but like many things pulled out of context, it has come to have a life of its own. It came to mind when I was thinking about this newsletter and working on a draft of it about craft versus practice, and wanting to make the point that I am a writer because I’ve spent so much of my time writing. But then it got hold of me, the way a really good quote or sentence can, and has wormed its way into my psyche. I have been thinking about it for two weeks, but I have also been thinking about it in some way and subconsciously for over a year.
It is easy to forget in the humdrum of days that so much of what we don’t consider our lives is, in fact, the core of it. So often we are passing time to get to the next thing. Getting through the workday to get to the after-work activity. Getting through the week to get to the weekend. Getting through the winter to get to the spring. Etc. And on. Until you have passed months and years and you wonder where the time went. That sounds sad, and it is somewhat, but it’s also just reality. Not every waking moment can be spent in the pursuit of pleasure or joy; drudgery—chores, errands, care of the body or of others—is unavoidable. Dillard knew that. What she was, and I am, interested in is what you do with the time that feels “free.” When you have a choice of how to spend your wisest resource, what do you do?
Choice is the operative word there; this quote is about choosing how to spend your life. What we do with our days; that’s an active phrase. You have to choose what to do with your days. And in making a choice, or NOT making a choice—because the absence of choice is also a choice—you have defined a part of your life. A single day in it. They all add up. And that is what I’ve been hung up on. The idea of all of life, every moment and thought and action, being a conscious choice. What do my choices say about me? About how I live? Added up, what kind of life do they make?
Let’s look at the whole paragraph this quote is taken from. There’s an image I want you to remember.
“I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked and so brought into being; its is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
Doesn’t that lifeboat she mentions sound a little cursed? A little tragic? It appears in my mind as this terrible float keeping you just above total boredom, a raft you’ll float down a life of mediocrity. And “a net for catching days”—awful! I never want to be under that net! The idea of it as “a peace and a haven” doesn’t do enough to counter the negative imagery of “decades later, still living”; of “a blurred and powerful pattern.” There is a foreboding sense in this paragraph. Make the wrong choice and your life might be poorly spent. Yikes.
As the first edition of this newsletter implied, I have been ruminating a lot on time spent lately, largely in contemplation of time spent on work and activities and what those yield. But Dillard’s quote, resurfaced in my brain, has made me shift that thinking into the larger implication of the dedication of that time; how the way in which we spend it, and what we spend it on, reflect the sum of our lives.
How do you know? you might be wondering. How can you tell if the choices are right?
You can’t, really. At least not in a definitive way. No one will ever be able to tell you if you’ve spent your life the right way. You might be able to tell you, but not until you are old and at the end of it (if you are lucky to live long enough to get to look back in that way). But I think you can feel that you’re at least trying to lead it in the right way. And making a choice in the first place is the first step in that. Not just passing time.
It’s difficult to begin to quantify how much time I have spent writing. For many years, for most of my life really, I have dedicated the bulk of my free time (outside of social time) to writing. I worked on it hard but I also love it. Even when it feels like pulling teeth, I am always glad for having sat down and eeked out a sentence or two or five. And not only do I write for myself, but it was also a part of my career; for over a decade, I was a copywriter and editor. Thus the vast majority of my adult days have been spent doing something with words. I went to work and I wrote headlines and product copy and blog posts and press materials, and on the sly I wrote essays and newsletters and journals, and in my outside time I wrote two novels and more essays. I went to graduate school to study writing, and I started doing feature journalism for magazines and online publications. At a point, a day where I didn’t write anything in any capacity felt foreign. I didn’t have to force myself to show up for the page because I was always showing up; not doing it was unimaginable.
In all that time spent working on my craft—different from practicing, a distinction I’m making for a reason and one I’ll write about in another newsletter—it slowly became my entire identity. I was not just a writer as in a person who sometimes wrote, but a writer as in someone who is entirely consumed by, concerned with, makes money on, dedicates herself to writing. I would joke sometimes that I wrote because I was unfit to do anything else, but I also believed that! Until I opened The Buzzed Word, I had had only two forms of employment in my life: As a waitress, and as a writer. I didn’t see a world where I did anything else but write for a living, and I didn’t particularly want to either. It nourished me; my life was very rich filled by words as it was.
And then I opened a business.
I have written before about why I decided to open The Buzzed Word; the short of it is my mom died and I realized life was too short to not take risks, and because I saw a lack in my community and knew I could fill it. There was another part though, one I haven’t talked about nearly as much because it scrapes up against feelings of failure and giving up that are really uncomfortable to sit with. But let’s go there, shall we?
In the later half of my 20s, I was working very hard at writing in order to publish a book. I wrote a whole novel in my 2 year MFA program and then right after graduating, I started an entirely new one. That would take me 3 years to get in a coherent full form; by the time I began the process of opening The Buzzed Word, it was 3.5 years into being and on a path to agent-shopping. I was and am really proud of that novel. I didn’t mean to set it aside. I thought I could still write and run my business. Not because I’m naive about time management (though honestly I am, pretty terrible about it in fact) but because I had always written. No matter how many other things had been going on in my life, I always made time for writing.
It turns out starting a business is really time consuming though! And you do not, actually, have much time to work on side creative projects. I could have made more time; if I hadn’t taken up surfing, I would have had more for sure. But surfing was what I needed. It gave me a release I hadn’t realize I was a tense mess without. And throwing myself into my business felt actually really good. Cathartic. It was so different from anything I had ever done. I no longer worked behind a computer, but actively and on my feet; I had human interaction every day, in a serviceable way, not from chatting about mundane office things. And I realized fairly soon after opening that I was… kind of relieved to not have the time to write. I could easily point to the business and say “Look! No time!” And it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. I had spent so long filling my hours, my days, with writing that I was completely exhausted by it. It had begun to feel like an obligation. It was what I did because it… was what I did. What I had always done. I was on the hamster wheel, and I WAS the hamster wheel. How could I get off without losing my entire sense of self?
Then I did. And frankly, I did feel like I lost myself for awhile. I struggled with not writing even as I couldn’t motivate myself to do it. My novel was rejected by an agent in September and then it just sat. Months ticked by, noticed. I knew exactly what I needed to do with it. But I couldn’t make myself. And that made me squirmy. I felt like a failed writer. Like I gave up on my book, even though I knew I wanted to go back to it. If I wasn’t writing, was I still a writer? If I was now a business owner, was I less of a writer?
Now, I spent my days—at least 6 a week every week, 9 hours at minimum each—at my store. There are about a million things that go into running a business; I won’t bore you by listing them, but suffice to say my days get filled fast and easily by that work. In the beginning it was kind of lonely. It was such solitary work; I was always by myself working, and no one could understand the stresses of it. But as time went on and the store created memories, gained regulars and a community imprint, it’s become so fulfilling. So much so that when I had COVID recently and had to quarantine away from it, I really really missed it. I was excited to return to my space, my sanctuary, my baby, this beautiful thing I had built for my town and the people in it. I like spending my days this way.
I had taken about a year off from writing in a real way. The only things I wrote from the time I began building out The Buzzed Word last April until two weeks ago were an essay for The Bitter Southerner, still in progress, and two final dispatches from my last newsletter. Maybe 10,000 words in a year. This is not many for someone who used to write several thousand a week for years and years. But at some point I realized I had needed it. I had to step away to start to value it. And for energy—after all those years of trying to find something to say, I had nothing left.
In her really terrific newsletter Unsupervised [which you should absolutely subscribe to], the artist Anna Fusco wrote recently about the time spent not making art, and how being an artist is a lot of not actually doing the art. She notes that she always felt like being an artist was being “50% world-sponge.” World-sponge is a good way to put it. I had tapped myself out on source material, which is, of course, life. Writing comes from life. Art comes from life. To make it, and to make it any good, you need to live. I needed to spend the last year living in order to have something to say again.
Fusco also notes that making art is work, and not always fun; less fun than other jobs she’s had, like being a server in Brooklyn at a sexy pizza restaurant. I have always loved writing, and sometimes it is fun in the way that it’s enormously satisfying and you can trick yourself in hindsight into thinking the process was also fun, not just the reward feeling. But sometimes I just don’t feel like it. The summer after I left graduate school, before I started my second novel, I did not write very much fiction. I was having fun—as a waitress, in my beach town for the first time in years, with various lovers and then a boyfriend. Sometimes, my store is kinda like my sexy pizza restaurant—writing is not nearly as much fun as running The Buzzed Word. Tasting wine and ordering it and writing the little tags for every bottle; reading book reviews and arranging displays and unpacking stock; being behind the bar, pouring glasses and chattering with regulars and occasionally flirting. Usually that’s way better than sitting down in front of my computer or journal and working on a chapter that I’ve rewritten 20 times before. But writing also gives me a fuel that nothing else ever has. It makes me feel like myself. And I make sense of the world on the page. Without writing, I have no anchor. Occasionally it is great, necessary even, to be unmoored. To float along and see what you pick up in the current. But then it’s important to ground yourself. To create with what you’ve gleaned.
I started this newsletter in part because I realized I finally had things to say again. I Was still having fun not writing, but less. The words had started to build up. And I wanted to put them out into the world. In quarantine, I started editing an essay. And then I thought, maybe I’ll look at the book. And that was it: The floodgates opened. Over a few days, I wrote like an insane person—like I hadn’t written in a year. I edited my essay, and then I spent 6 hours on my novel, and then I wrote THREE different newsletters (!). I had so many feelings and thoughts! I didn’t know which to target first! So I went for all of them. It was a torrent. I actually struggled this week thinking about which topic to send because there was just SO MUCH I wanted to work on. I have carved out some hours in my week at the store to write these. And in doing so, I realized I could finally strike a balance. I could choose carefully how to spend my days so they reflected my identity now; not only one thing, one kind of person, not only a writer but a business woman and an Ocean City community member and a surfer.
Remember that lifeboat from Dillard’s quote? If I had only kept writing, diligently putting in the hours day after day, I would have been on that lifeboat. And if I had never gone back to it, if I had been content to just do the pretty fun work of running The Buzzed Word, I also would have been on that lifeboat. Because both of them were easy enough to just keep doing, to ride along in that life. There is no choice in how to spend my day if I only have one option.
A few paragraphs after that quote in The Writing Life, Dillard had another hit:
“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading-that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one.”
Here is what I am practicing now: How to have each day be more of an active choice. How to consider so carefully the life in the hours, and the hours in my life. I know that there will be many days where I don’t have a choice and they will be spent in ways I probably wouldn’t want to if I had another option; I know there are days I would rather write than bartend, or surf than stock, or organize than write. But when I do have a choice, I’m going to try to make it more wisely. To have a series of days that are uniquely fulfilling and varied. That contain all the parts of myself, and that help expand all the parts of myself. I don’t want to be caught in the net. Found on the lifeboat, still living but barely. I want to be steering the craft with intention and joy towards the thrilling edges of everything.
It’s the rub of life that only after it’s long spent can we take its measure; hindsight is a gift, but it’s also a curse. There is nothing you can do about the past. But we can thankfully learn from it; use it as a compass on which to feel our present and perhaps guide our future. In thinking about that, I will leave you with one for food for thought item. It’s from the great Mary Oliver; you have probably heard this.
You don’t have to plan. But that one wild and precious life is a choice. Use it wisely.
Just what I needed today. At my age, I am learning to give myself a gift to just spend a day reading, exploring the language and art of other people. It is nourishment for the soul. Just like being with good friends.