Take your time

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly

Hi Blueberries!

I have two in-person evening workshops coming up in NYC. They’re each two hours on a weekday evening (easy peasy!) in the East Village, which will be blooming and bustling on a spring twilight.

I want you to be there! Here’s what they’re all about:

LIVING ARTFULLY: Bringing creativity into everyday life

Creativity thrives in the way you notice, gather, and respond to your days. This workshop explores how to bring a creative sensibility into everyday life by paying attention to what moves you, following your curiosities, and treating ordinary moments as magic. Through a series of thoughtful exercises and conversation, we will explore how creativity is already present in your life and how to shape it into a practice that feels natural, sustaining, and your own.

This session is for you if…

• You want to infuse more wonder into your daily life

• You’re curious about paying closer attention to your own thoughts, memories, and daily experiences

• You’re a writer or artist who wants a natural and personal creative practice

• You’ve been away from creativity for a while and want to dip your toe back in

• You’ve never had a creative practice and want a comfortable way to start

Wednesday, May 20th, 6:30-8:30pm
602 E. 9th Street
New York, NY
$95

Register here!

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HIDDEN THREAD: Unearthing your best ideas

You already have more material than you think. This workshop is about learning how to recognize the patterns, themes, and questions that keep returning in your creative life. Through guided prompts and reflection, we’ll uncover what is already alive in you and asking for attention, then begin growing it into possible directions for future work.

This session is for you if…

• You like to write but don’t know what to write about

• You feel stuck or blocked and need a reset

• You find a lot of meaning in your life but you’re not sure what’s interesting to other people

• You’re an avid writer who needs some new material

Tuesday, June 2nd, 6:30-8:30pm
602 E. 9th Street
New York, NY
$95

Register here!

Okay! Hope to see you there in the heart of my favorite NYC neighborhood!

Speaking of which, when I lived in the East Village, I’d almost always come home to somebody or several somebodies sitting on my front stoop.

When apartments are crowded with roommates, coffee shops don’t have seats, serious conversations interrupt a walk, and sometimes you just need to pull over and collect yourself…the front steps of apartment buildings serve as extensions of living spaces.

Stoops are the city’s furniture; they’re ideal seating for bagel-eating, newspaper-reading, furiously texting, and of course, photo-shooting.

We all know this, and yet we all apologize when the person whose building it is walks up or down the steps.

On 9th Street in the East Village, people were always on my stoop, and I was always coming and going, so I collected these insincere but socially-mandatory apologies all day long. And I loved it.

In a city/society/world where mercy can feel miraculous, I loved continually doling out grace like penny candy to anybody who got to enjoy the concrete arms of my crappy apartment building—ready to dutifully cradle any stranger who needed a pause or a portrait.

After all, our city and our culture prize urgency. Anyone taking the time to sit on a stoop is resisting the idea that any break must justify itself!

2018 was my peak stoop-pardoning era

“No worries at all!”

“You’re so fine!”

“My stoop is here for you!”

“Enjoy yourself!” I’d get to say over and over. What a delight!

Sometimes the repeated pardons matched a day of serendipity and sweetness after skipping home from pizza and rosé with friends on a patio, and sometimes they cut through the big city fog of accumulated burdens and bruises and sidewalk humiliations. It was my anchoring ritual of tiny love, in case I forgot to love earlier in the day.

These days, I don’t have a stoop, so I have to find other rituals of grace in order to keep the city plush and pillowy for myself.

My new one is half-love-ritual, half-social-stance:

I take as many opportunities to say “I’ve got time” as I possibly can.

Someone in the grocery line notices I was there first and beckons me ahead: “You go ahead, I’ve got time.”

Barista delivers the news that it will be a couple minutes for my coffee to brew: “That’s fine, I’ve got time.”

Cashier apologizes for payment system being slow: “No problem at all; I’ve got time.”

It’s both true (I’ve got time, we’ve all got time) and also my little resistance project to the accepted fast pace of New York (and probably everywhere in our age of convenience).

I started this practice the day after I returned home from Chile in early April.

As is the case for many Americans who get to revel in an unhurried, communal, watermelon-flavored, salsa-soundtracked, and sun-dappled culture for a few days only to be oozed out of the plane into a passport line from hell where sunshine is only a faint idea…returning home was a harsh jolt.

“It was like being catapulted from a field of peonies to an empty lot of shattered glass,” I told friends.

Immediately, everyone at JFK looked like they would really rather I be dead.

I instantly endured a berating from a sneering customs agent so exorbitant and unprovoked that my shoulders shook the rest of the morning. (They have a hard job, I know they have a hard job.)

As all pitifully sensitive creatures do, I analyzed the severe interactions for the next few days—trying to make sense and even meaning out of (no other way to say it) really getting my feelings hurt!

I broke them down by comparing my values in that scenario vs. that of the airport staff. I reminded myself that airport workers are rewarded for relentless speed, outsized productivity, brittle self-protection, and even high stress in order to motivate travelers to also be stressed—and thus move as quickly as possible.

As I sleepwalked out of the plane, carrying my disoriented baby with one hand and my stupidly heavy luggage with the other, my hope was for ease, gentleness, and warm human interaction to welcome me home.

The airport staff’s hope was to get me through the line and never see me again in their lives.

I realize we had differing hopes for our morning.

And, I realize that, annoyingly, “protecting Mari’s sensitivity” is not listed on the job description for customs agents.

Then, a greater revelation dawned on me like a passionfruit-colored sunrise over the Andes Mountains:

I do not value efficiency.

Thus, the goals of JFK International Airport are in direct opposition to my worldview!

I giddily noticed that I could easily transfer this epiphany to all kinds of issues in my life that are causing me woe right now.

“I do not value efficiency” has been VERY helpful to remember lately as I find myself in a season of staggering slowness.

Everything that is happening in life right now is happening sloooowwwwly.

I’m writing slowly. My pace of creative output is slow. My adjustment to the new shape and size and limitations of my body is a slow journey. I’m getting back to people slowly.

And, aside from occasionally morphing into the Tasmanian Devil in order to clean and answer emails during Mari Jr’s naps, my days are slow and totally unproductive.

On sunny days I often spend entire mornings on a park lawn watching my baby play with a single blade of grass. A voice in my head questions my “use of time.” So you can sit here for two hours staring at a baby who is staring at the ground, but you ‘don’t have time’ to put the dishes away??

“I DO have time,” I answer, and I repeat this over and over all day to unsuspecting New Yorkers who are inadvertently a part of my emotional practice.

“I’ve got time,” I insist to them, and to myself, and to the voice in my head who won’t shut up about the dishes.

This personal protest has become even more important to my life as I hear three hundred thousand four hundred and fifty-seven times a day.

“ENJOY EVERY MINUTE OF MOTHERHOOD IT GOES BY SO FAST!!!!!!!!!”

I started questioning this maxim during pregnancy. Does it really go by so fast? Does it have to go by fast??

Were people saying that to new parents in the Middle Ages or is childhood swiftness a contemporary affliction? If I do enjoy every moment, will it still go by fast? Is there a big issue with it going by fast? What’s the “note behind the note” as they say in film school, i.e. What do they really mean by that??

Different people mean different things, of course, but what does NOT help me enjoy every minute or even some minutes is the pressure to optimize motherhood.

By that, I mean:

• “What you do in the first two minutes after your baby wakes up sets the tone for their whole day—and will contribute to their emotional regulation skills for years to come”

• “Are you introducing toys in the right order? Here’s what the research says”

• “Why what you say while you change their diaper matters more than you know”

• “The window for raising an adventurous eater is small—here’s how not to miss it”

And, the grand finale:

“Here are 10 ways to make your baby’s bedtime more whimsical”

I took that last doozy to my therapist after experiencing manufactured anxiety that maybe my baby’s evenings weren’t whimsical enough, and after laughing at the absurdity, she replied with three points:

1. “You embody whimsy. You don’t need to worry about this.”
2. “Any time you see a Here’s 10 Things list, you can disregard it.”
3. “90% of the pain that people bring to my office is caused by the pressure to optimize.”

“What’s the opposite of optimization?” I asked.

“Being a human,” she responded.

Playing with toys alongside my baby sparks wonder, and introducing solids is the greatest privilege (I get to introduce FOOD—the greatest of all human pleasures—to a HUMAN!!!), and waking up with my baby is sacred because it is un-optimize-able.

Or so I thought, before reading that Instagram caption.

Efficiency is what TV remote controls are good at, but whenever people try to maximize their productivity in the speediest way, things start to go south.

Crash diets, depressed lottery winners, love bombing, child actors with quarter-life crises, cities that gentrify overnight and lose everything that made them worth living in, plants grown with too much fertilizer that shoot up fast and then collapse…

We have all the evidence that getting too much, too fast, has painful outcomes. Maximizing and optimizing leaves us hollow.

But it’s also so counter-cultural to just be a person (without person-maxxing!) that it can feel like you’re doing something wrong if you’re taking your time.

Related: I also love telling people “Take your time.”

A really nice image comes to mind—that of being offered one’s own time, and then happily accepting it.

I love the agency that we can bestow upon each other with this phrase—the invitation to be assertive and TAKE, the reminder of a rightful possession YOUR, and the mysterious earthly force becoming something so ordinary and small that we can give it to strangers in our midst TIME.

Here, take it. Your time.

One of my favorite books ever is The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, the memoir of a bedridden writer who has nothing to do but watch her pet snail explore the terrarium on her nightstand.

(I wrote a short story in middle school about a bedridden girl with nothing to do but watch the life cycle of a cherry tree outside her window, so it was exciting to read a real-life account of this micro-genre!)

In the snail story, Elisabeth Tova Bailey reflects beautifully on time:

“We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.”

Isn’t it such a universal phenomenon that the situations which give us the most amount of time are the seasons of life when we don’t “need” as much? (I remember being resentful toward a ‘snow day’ during a long period of unemployment, because it was just more forced leisure that meant nothing to me!)

Yet, in this period of slowness, I’m questioning anyone’s “need” for time. We live in it, yet we’re constantly talking about it. We complain that January was too slow and June is too fast.

Parents tell me, about parenting, “The days are long but the years are short,” and I get what they mean, but I still think it’s silly. The paradox of human life is that it’s so long and so short; we have so much time and we could use so much more of it.

(Can you imagine an animal fussing over the hours in their day??)

Has efficiency ever really helped us, both personally and as a species? Do you know anybody who “optimizes” everything who is also joyful and present?

These are genuine questions.

But I think you can guess my inclination when it comes to answering either.

So here is my entirely inefficient, definitely inconvenient, zero-optimized plan: Keep saying “I’ve got time” until my belief in it is so strong that I can plop myself back into the present on a dime.

My plan is to allow the new shape of my body to slowly breathe her way back into the world (and into my clothes)—showing signs of a life lived on the outside, and showing me how to care for her on the inside.

My plan is to not take advantage of my baby’s “wake windows” for optimal brain development, but to sit there side by side and wonder at each other, so unhurried that I’ll swear five minutes was 2 hours.

I want my days to make temporal room the way my old stoop made physical room—for spontaneous breaks, pauses, bagels, cries, and maybe a selfie or two.

Take your time.

I’ve got time. If you’re short on it, you can have some of mine. :)