On Time
I cranked her up, pointed her east, and hugged the right lane all the way to Fall Creek Falls. I asked my daughter where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do for fall break this year and the answer again and again was “go somewhere in an RV.”
After unsuccessfully trying to talk her out of this harebrained idea several times, I made rental plans, reserved campsites, and counted down the days until I would grit my teeth through the entire ordeal. While I love being outdoors, my total lifetime camping experiences have boiled down to a handful of times that someone else has done all the planning and the other handful of times the Courtyard lobby was under construction so breakfast would not be served the next morning.
What I quickly learned about driving an RV and then posting up at a campground is this: you can’t be in a hurry. Driving a studio apartment through traffic, and then rain, and then on winding roads at dusk forces you to take it slow, lay off the gas, soak in all of what’s around you (it takes a few more seconds to bring a few hundred square feet to a complete stop), and a develop confidence that you’ll get there when you get there. We let the weather and our whims plan our days for that long weekend. We packed up when we felt like it was time to move on. And outside of a few reservations to kayak and complete a ropes course, we didn’t look at our watches much. It was the most nerve wracking and peaceful vacation I’ve ever experienced.
Ideal Schedule
Whenever I’m in need of motivation, I often look at my calendar. Am I being as productive as possible? Where is the margin in my life? How much time am I wasting? Why can’t I get everything done when expected? I have thought the answer to my productivity woes could be found by setting up an ideal schedule:
Between 5AM and Noon: wake up, sweat somehow (work out), eat breakfast, focus on intense creative work
Noon - 1PM - Eat lunch (alone or with someone else)
1PM - 5PM - Do work that can be interrupted, go to meetings, answer emails
Doesn’t that life sound sexy? Perfectly compact and complete. No room for error. Maybe even less room for meaning.
While on our RV extravaganza, we stayed one night with Ben, with whom I now have 20 years of friendship. He works remotely and so much like an entrepreneur, he mostly has full control of his daily schedule. He, too, would love a routine life where everything is planned and pat and wrapped up by sundown.
And while we riffed on notions of productivity citing sages like Newport, Ferriss, and Taleb, we also understood that schedules and plans only work in lonely vacuums, free from family, spontaneity, and yes, meaning.
Ideal schedules aren’t ideal because they focus on ideal time blocks. They are ideal schedules because they focus on ideal living.
The days are long. Period.
Over lunch with friend and new dad Josh, he told me, “It’s true what they say: the days are long but the years are short.” He has a 15-month old and he realized recently that with work as busy as it is, some days he’s just on a race toward bedtime. Once his daughter is asleep then he can finally get back to those emails and calls that have been waiting for him since dinner.
Kudos for him for recognizing this is no way to parent. “I saw very quickly that I wasn’t being the dad I had always wanted to be. I didn’t want to rush through story time.” There is time for stories and there is time for email. The days are just long. You can look back one day if you want and wonder where the time went, but I’ll go ahead and tell you where it went: everywhere slowly.
No time like the present
I can’t meditate. I can barely even write a post like this without stopping to note the tangent ideas that come in my head and open 15 browser tabs to chase down one of those or to at least see if something I’m thinking is a full thought. So the idea of clearing my head - even with the help of an app - is laughable. If my head is ever clear because I’m not actively focused on some thought then I’ll fall asleep. God bless my REM cycle.
But I can focus. And I can be present. As my daughter gets older, the conversations become deeper and her reminders to put my down my phone become more frequent (as do my reminders to put down her iPad). And in those moments I realize the point of the scheduling, the clock watching and all the damn timing: this is what I’ve been waiting for.
It’s the broken heater on a cool night that you finally get working again. It’s the teaching of new card games and the listening to friend drama. It’s the slow reading of a good book and telling of a corny joke. It’s the singing of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” as loudly as you can because the road is dark and empty and 27 miles until home still feels like forever.
Which is just enough time to make a memory.
