Last week I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and have thought about it every day since. Not only because it’s a great movie—seriously, it is SO GOOD—but because it captures how chaotic life feels for me right now. Everything is happening all at once. (By everything, I mean a swirling vortex of family commitments, medical appointments, taxes, workshops and snowstorms.) And I feel like I am trying to live all my multiverse lives in one single timeline.
Now, in the movies, the natural reaction would be to fight—and ultimately bring order to all this chaos somehow. But I’ve chosen instead to succumb to it, on the advice of Oliver Burkeman, whose book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I just finished reading.
It was a surprising and refreshing read—a real bait-and-switch. I went in kind of dreading it, thinking all I’d get would be a bunch of unrealistic productivity tips, but it is wonderfully honest (and pleasantly nihilistic) in its premise: there will never be enough time, so stop trying to control it.
So this week (and probably the next, too, because of the aforementioned everything), I’m giving myself over to the chaos and just simply living in it. Burkeman calls this “deep time,” the kind of time you experience while taking care of a newborn, when there’s nothing you can really do but exist. When all your grand plans and schemes to shape/manage/control time fall by the wayside and you find yourself just living each hour as it passes. Humans used to live like this, he says. And kids still do. It’s not an easier existence, but it feels less frenzied, and that’s what I’m looking for.
Deep time means I’m just going to do whatever needs doing as it comes up, and forget the future for now.
So in the spirit of being in the moment, I now give you a drawing of my childhood K-Way, because I just opened an email in my inbox that tells me K-Ways are now available at Holt Renfrew, because they have somehow become high-fashion in recent years.
Is making a drawing of a K-Way a good way to spend my time, especially when I have too much going on? Well, Burkeman would probably reject the premise of that question. Is there a “good” way to spend time? And is “spending”—an ultra-capitalistic conception of time—the only way to think about it?
I don’t have answers, but I can tell you this: I felt calm and present and happy while making this drawing. And that’s good enough for me. Kid Teresa also approves.
:) Teresa
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I really want to see that movie. And the book sounds right up my alley as well. I have an audiobook credit so maybe I will use it for that. One question though: I have never heard the term K-Way -- is it a brand name? Or something else? What does it mean? From a curious south of the border reader ;-)