The useful afternoon
There is a particular kind of guilt that arrives when an afternoon has nothing to show for itself. The light has moved across the floor. A cup has gone cold. Perhaps a few pages were read and then read again because the mind wandered somewhere else. Nothing has been completed. No little box can be checked. The day was here, and then it was less here, and I feel the need to defend what happened to it.
I could call it rest. That would make it sound responsible. Rest improves performance, restores attention, prepares me to be useful again. I know the argument, and it works. But I dislike how quickly I reach for it. Even my defense of doing nothing has become an explanation of how doing nothing will eventually produce something. I seem unable to let an afternoon exist without giving it a job.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to use time well. I like making things work better. I like finding the unnecessary step and taking it out. In a program, this can be a beautiful act. Less waste, less waiting, less work imposed on somebody else. But somewhere between the program and the rest of my life, I forget to ask whether I am still trying to solve the same problem.
A better route to where
An optimization needs something to optimize for. That part is easy to forget when the language of improvement becomes a habit. Faster is only better if arriving sooner is what I wanted. Shorter is only better if the distance held nothing worth noticing. A conversation can become more efficient right up to the moment it stops feeling like a conversation.
I think of all the small things that would look unreasonable from the perspective of a perfect schedule. Listening to a song again because the first time was not enough. Taking the long way without an explanation. Letting a friend finish a story whose ending I already know. There is a kind of repetition that does not waste the experience. It is the experience. Remove it and there is less life, even if there is more time.
That is the contradiction I keep returning to. I keep trying to save time, and then behaving as if the time I saved must never be spent. It has to be invested, protected, turned into more saved time. There is always another thing that can be made quicker. I am accumulating an afternoon I never allow myself to have.
Without a receipt
Maybe I am afraid that if I stop measuring, I will discover I have been avoiding a simpler question. Not how much I did, but whether I wanted to be doing it. Measurement gives me somewhere to hide. A number can improve while the thing it was supposed to represent quietly gets worse. I can become very good at recording a life and very distracted from living one.
I do not have a grand rebellion planned. I am not throwing away the calendar or pretending that deadlines are an illusion. There are responsibilities that deserve my attention, and people who rely on me to be dependable. I only want to leave a few things outside the arrangement. Some music that does not need to make me smarter. Some reading that does not need to become a credential. Some time with someone I love that does not need to count as anything else.
Even writing this, I can feel the temptation to make it a rule. A certain number of unproductive hours. A system for having fewer systems. That is almost funny, how quickly the old habit finds a new costume. Perhaps the first thing I can refuse to optimize is the refusal itself. It does not have to be consistent to be real.
The cup can go cold. The light can cross the room. I can look at it for a while without deciding what looking is good for. When the afternoon ends, there may still be nothing to show. I would like to learn how to say that without apologizing.