All the Thyme in the World

It's so easy to feel overwhelmed.  My to-do lists are epic – more a record of what I don't get done than what I do.  And it's so easy to fall into the twin traps of wearing one's busy-ness as a badge of honor, on the one hand, and complaining about it, on the other.
     
I want to avoid both of those traps, of course.  There is real danger in overcommitment – for one's  relationships, one's health, one's finances, and the quality of one's projects.  And we need to take this danger seriously.  By the same token, it is also unseemly, or worse, to complain about having to carry through with the commitments one has made.  Decoupled from action to responsibly handle one's commitments (including ending them when appropriate), complaints ring hollow, smacking of a lack of maturity or courage.  

Much has been written about both of these traps, much of it generally wise.  There's a whole subgenre of self-help literature out there urging people to "simplify," "downshift," or get "back to basics".   It's been around for many decades, long before Marie Kondo invited us to tidy up by getting rid of anything that doesn't "spark joy."  And it's safe to say I have been a simplification enthusiast for many years.  From my high school speech team days, when I composed original speeches exploring the idea that "less is more," to moving from corporate-defense-attorney-in-the-city to small-town-#mommylawyer-and-would-be-#hobbyfarmer in the last few years, I've been aspiring to the simple life, or a version of it, basically all of my adult life.

You can probably guess what comes next.  There's a big "But" just itching to make its way onto the page.  So here's the "But" you might expect:  But now that I'm living into that aspiration, I'm realizing my simple life is anything but simple, at least if the definition of "simple" includes significant amounts of free time to reflect and relax.  Free time?  What's that?  I can't even wrap my head around the idea anymore.  Between the kids, the household, client projects, community projects, and farm projects, all my time (and more) is fully accounted for.  And that's with a lot of help:   a spouse who's fully engaged at home, a cheerful and diligent legal assistant at the office, my loving parents, a generous professional mentor and his legal assistant, the highly capable people I serve with in community organizations, my kids' teachers and caretakers – not to mention the good people at Kenmore and Samsung who made my washer, dryer, and dishwasher, or the good folks at the municipal electricity authority who help make sure those appliances have power to run.  My village, writ both small and large, multiplies my time in ways I could not manage alone.  Twenty-first century loaves and fishes.

So with all this help, why don't I have any "free time"?  Undoubtedly, there are a variety of reasons, which are probably layered upon one another in interesting ways.  But for now, I'll focus on two possibilities.  First, it may just be that this season of life doesn't afford much in the way of unallocated time.  My kids are little – ages six, three, and almost-two at this time of this writing – so caring for them is necessarily time and energy intensive, crowding out a lot of other activities.  I can't count how many times I've had friends with children five or ten years older than mine knowingly and sympathetically say, "It gets easier" – usually when I'm chasing two wild ones (or breaking up a fight) and wondering where the third wandered off to.

But does it?  Should it?  This is the "But" you might not expect and the second possible explanation for why I seem not to have any "free time".  What if there is something not-quite-right about the idea of "free time" to begin with?  What if time is never "free" – at least not in the common, casual sense of that phrase?  What if the simple life is less about time off and time out and more about time spent on valuable projects, projects that help address real needs in the world or enable us to bring our gifts into the world?  What if the freedom of the simple life is not freedom from responsibility but instead freedom to be able to respond to a worthy need or a deep calling?  What if you become gripped by a vision of the good life that, to some extent, takes on a momentum and a gravity of its own, drawing you into a dance with and toward itself, through which you might transform into someone who can respond to the world, or at least your corner of it, with a mature sense of purpose?

And what if this good and simple life is really hard sometimes (or most of the time)?  What if it leaves you sleep deprived for weeks or months at a stretch, or frequently takes your breath away with the sheer volume of tasks required?  What if it means things will be messier than you're comfortable with, both literally and figuratively, or that you have to live with a greater degree of uncertainty and vulnerability than you would prefer?

I want to be careful not to overstate this second point.  I take it as given that paring down and practicing a certain minimalism is a good thing, whether we're talking about physical possessions and debts or activities and engagements.  And I certainly don't want to downplay the need for self-care or the very real risks of burn-out and overextension. But I am learning that neither minimalism nor self-care, in and of themselves, should be my goal.  I shouldn't practice them for their own sake, but rather because they are means to other ends. They are methods or strategies to help us figure out what's important, what matters, what "sparks joy."  By de-cluttering our living spaces, our wardrobes, our calendars, our diets, and our minds, we create time and space for the important stuff.  We prepare ourselves for the miracle of the loaves and fishes.    

     

But at some point, we've got to actually start doing the important stuff and not just clearing room and time for it.  And ironically, that's where things can get complicated again.  First of all, how do you know you're doing the right important stuff?  How do you choose between one worthwhile task or goal or life path versus others?  As a practical matter, there are infinitely more good and important things that you could potentially do than you can actually do.  Einstein might have come to understand that the linearity of time was a "stubbornly persistent illusion" – but I, for one, still have not figured out how to teach my oldest how to tie her shoes and consult with a client on an estate plan at the same time (although I've come awfully close a few times).  Or, to pan the camera out a bit, I cannot simultaneously inhabit the life of a tenured professor of religion at a university or liberal arts college (the path I once assumed I would take after college) and the life of a small-town mother, attorney, and community advocate.  Perhaps there is another quantum reality in which I, or some version of me, is inhabiting that other life – or the life of a public school administrator, or the owner a New England apple orchard, or a publishing house editor or writers' agent, or even a writer myself (gasp!).  There are at least half a dozen life paths that probably would have been a good fit for me. But the "I" that walks my current path cannot, or at least does not, experience those others from the inside.

At some earlier point, like Frost's speaker in "The Road Not Taken," I had to choose between competing goods, between alternative versions of the good life.  Those "two roads diverged" in front of me (or three roads, or four, or more), "and sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler," I had to pick one.  Fortunately, both for me and for the poem's speaker, the one I took seemed (and still seems) "as just as fair, / and having perhaps the better claim".  Yet it was a real choice.  Having taken one path, I'll probably never get to take the others, at least not in any fully incarnated sense.  "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back."  And there is a measure of tragedy in that, which should be acknowledged, perhaps even mourned a little bit.  Being human means we don't get to do all the good things.  The linearity of our day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience of time – illusion or not – means that, as a practical matter, we are limited to taking one path at a time.  We must make choices.

But – and this is the key and final "But" – what if that very limitation is the ticket?  What if the practice of choosing between competing goods, in matters both large and small, on a daily, even hourly, basis, is itself a path to the good life?  What if that is what it means to be free, or – dare I say it – to have "free time"? 

Here's what I mean: There is a certain clarifying effect to handling a little more than you're comfortable with at any given time.  If you find yourself in the privileged predicament of having more good, important, and necessary things that you could do with any given chunk of time than you can actually do with that time, then you have to prioritize.  You have to figure out which of those competing goods is important enough to act on at any given moment, weighing both shorter and longer term considerations together, and then channeling your energies in that direction for as long as that particular good demands – or until another good makes a stronger claim on your time.  And that process or practice of choosing the most important thing at any given time has a way of purging or winnowing less important uses of your time from your life, and making you more efficient in carrying out the rest.  In this sense, taking on a little more than you're comfortable with can itself represent another strategy, an alternative to paring down, for feeling out what really matters to you – by forcing you to confront the issue of the value of your time over and over (and over!) again.

No doubt there are risks to this strategy.  Inevitably, you will not get your priorities right sometimes, perhaps a lot of the time.  And the pressure just to check some items off the ever-burgeoning to-do list can skew your time toward smaller, more clearly accomplishable goals, rather than bigger, bolder ones that require tending over long periods in order to bring them to fruition.  It's easy to find yourself adrift on a sea of tasks, lacking a unifying mission.  Also, mission creep is real.  But the discomfort that arises from trying to walk the fine line between growth and overextension is itself instructive, even if you cross the line more often than you should.  If you can train yourself to pay attention to that discomfort and use it as an ongoing impulse to seek out what is really meaningful, odds are you will, in fact, spend your time on things that resonate with your search.  Seek and ye shall find.

* * *

Of course, it is entirely possible that this reflection is just an elaborate rationalization of my own more or less constant flirtation with overextension.  If that is so, then I must accept the consequences.  But if there is some seed of truth here, then I stand to grow in my ability to discern meaning through the practice of prioritization.  And as I do, maybe I will find some convergence between those various paths that "diverged in a yellow wood."  Maybe they're not quite so mutually exclusive.  I may not be able to inhabit them all from the inside, but maybe – just maybe – I can weave strands of them together as I walk my chosen path.  I am writing (and editing!) this blog, after all, and the apple trees we planted last year are just a few weeks away from spring pruning.  I'm working closely with the administrators of our local public school district, in my current volunteer position as president of the district enrichment foundation.  And who knows?  Maybe teaching an adjunct class at the local junior college lies somewhere in the distance.   

* * *

A couple of weekends ago, Emma and I started our first seedlings for the herb garden we hope to put in this spring.  Last fall, we had gone in with some friends to place a seed order large enough to get a good discount from the seed company.  We ordered mostly vegetable seeds – several varieties of tomatoes, a couple different types of onions and peppers and cucumbers, some corn and green beans, and a few other veggies – but also a few herb and flower seeds.  Then, several weeks ago, I sat down with all of my seed packets to start a planting plan.  I had to figure out from the charts and instructions on the back of each seed packet which ones needed to be started indoors soon (then later transplanted) and which ones could be direct seeded in the garden bed in a few months, after the last frost.

As it turned out, the seeds that needed to be started earliest were the thyme seeds.  So Emma and I prepped the soil plugs and opened the seed packet, at which point I realized this was going to be a little harder than I had anticipated.  Thyme seeds are tiny!  Like, fine-grains-of-sand tiny!  I couldn't even pick them up with my fingers.  The packet said it held approximately 200 seeds, but all of them together didn't even fill a teaspoon halfway.  I could see why most people who put fresh thyme in their kitchen gardens just buy the seedlings.  But our soil plugs were ready, so I carefully poured about half of them onto a white piece of paper – fortunately, thyme seeds are black – and got a small cup of water to dip my index finger into.  I dabbed my wet finger onto the paper, attracting about three or four seeds at a time, then pressed them lightly into each of thirty-six plugs.  I couldn't tell whether I was actually getting the seeds into the plugs, since I couldn't distinguish the seeds from the soil.  So, blindly, just acting on faith, I dipped my finger back in the cup of water between each "planting" to clean off the bits of soil, dabbed up a few more seeds, and pressed them in the rest of the plugs.

Then we waited.  The thyme packet said it would take fourteen to twenty-one days for the seeds to germinate, so I wasn't expecting anything to happen right away.  We moistened the plugs with water from a spray bottle, covered the seed tray with clear plastic, and set it under the fluorescent lights of our grow cart. 

So we were more than a little surprised when tiny green sprouts emerged after just a few days of light and mist.  At first, a half dozen or so appeared, and then over a few more days, another couple of dozen popped through.  I felt like we were watching a minor miracle unfold in slow motion: new life pressing its way upward and outward, reaching toward light while feeding on a dark nutrient bed.  I felt rich.  Having squeezed in the time to plant these seeds, amidst the pressure of all the other good and important things that compete for my time, we were now witnessing a new type of abundance emerge.  I might chronically feel short on time, but at that moment, I felt like I had all the thyme in the world. 

I'll take that kind of freedom, anytime.