What Happens When You Finally Have Enough Time
I had four days off last week. It’s almost the schedule I want for everyone, honestly. We should work two days and rest five. The current arrangement feels like a clerical error humanity collectively forgot to correct, but that’s a post for another day.
Anyway, I greedily sopped up that stepping-stone version while I had it. And I wrung a lot out of those four days.
I finally went through the pile of mail that had been quietly reproducing on the counter for several weeks. I grocery shopped. Pulled weeds that had slowly staged a coup across the patio stones in the backyard. Worked on my book launch. Caught up with friends. Went to see a film about the universe at the science museum.
Mostly, it felt like clearing a backlog.
For once I had uninterrupted time to focus on these things instead of trying to wedge them into the cracks of the week. Not in ten minute increments here, twenty minute allotments there. Instead of life by appointment slot, I had space to make time feel like something I was inhabiting.
I spent two hours drinking tea at a neighbor’s house while we gabbed about living abroad, sexuality, star charts, and neighborhood politics. My partner and I met two strangers on a rooftop while watching Fourth of July fireworks and somehow ended up being recruited onto their trivia team.
Those moments felt oddly familiar. Like bumping into someone you haven’t seen in years and years and immediately remembering why you loved spending time with them.
Because if I’m honest, I think I’ve slowly lost touch with a version of myself. Well, not lost exactly. More like we’ve drifted apart? I can still make out his shape sometimes, but he feels like someone standing somewhere on the other side of a dense fog. He’s the version of me who could disappear into a book for an entire weekend at a cabin in the Shenandoah Valley and emerge blinking into daylight wondering where the time went. The version who could spend an entire day playing Final Fantasy and feel completely inside the game rather than vaguely aware of the dishes waiting in the sink or the emails waiting somewhere behind the horizon. The version who could wander through the woods for no reason at all—no phone, no goal, no time limit.
Most things in my life arrive time-boxed. Rationed out. Even my hobbies often feel like little islands of recreation scheduled between obligations. I’m not sure how we became those close friends who slowly lose touch over the years. But lately I’ve found myself wanting to reach through the fog and find the other hand reaching back.
