NOT KEEPING SCORE

Time is money.
And as it stands to reason: money=time.

Spending most of my day, these days, working and burning the midnight oil, I again come up against that age-old question — how much is my time worth? And… do I really want to sell it?

For us “creative types” searching to find balance between our (in my case) writing time and working time, is it an especially tenuous balance: I need time to write, but then I don’t have money to support myself to write… but if I work and get money, I ain’t go no time, and– shiiiiit.

The last year or so has been Down Time — recovery from city burn-out; recovery from life burn-out; family; travel. Part of me feels like playtime is over. Part of me… wonders how to make it a full time gig.

My freelancing is in full bloom now, and I’m back to working near 10-hour days, seven days a week. I’m doing it! I’m bringing in the bacon! I’m back to Career Girl mode, and it feels good!

…But not too good. The problem is: I got a taste of the good stuff, and I want more.

* * *

Another writer friend and I were talking about choice, and how to live [yippie buzzword warning:] authentically.

“We’re lucky,” I asserted. “We may struggle in artistic or financial ways when we choose a Life of the Artist [capitalized for emphatic self-mockery], but at least we are choosing our lives — many people don’t feel so empowered.”

“Choice?” She shot back, “you think this is a choice?”

Her point being, she knows herself well enough to know: she couldn’t live any other way.

* * *

Ah, the privilege and the curse of self-knowledge.

The problem is this: I love my job. It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s creative, and it pays the bills. Great! Except: not so great. It means I have a hard time not doing it. And as long as I’m doing it, I’m not doing what I really want to do: write quaint poems about Vietnamese motorbikes, for example. And the more time I spend writing about Vietnamese motorbikes, the more time I want to spend writing about Vietnamese motorbikes. And it doesn’t stop there — quaint poems turn into manuscript ideas which turn into concepts for one woman shows which… writing is an addictive substance.

The problem is: I know I want the juice, and I’m willing to pay for it.

* * *

There’s something that happens when tragedy slays you like a harpoon. You split. A chasm erupts right down your middle, and you die, momentarily.

When my brother died, I died.

And then, you are not reborn, but you rebirth yourself. You create anew. You “wring out the sponge” (as the good people at DeerPark podcast say), and see life as if you are seeing it for the first time.

This new vision hurts. Because with it, you see that you cannot go back. The past died right along with you. There is only forward, and it is blank.

Amidst this blankness, a few things become perfectly clear. Clear! There is no purpose to life but the purpose you give it; There is nothing to fear but ole fear; There is no holding you back.

If I have already died, what is there to death? If life already failed me, what is there to failure?

My brother’s death ruined me. My brother’s death saved me. It made me not care about anything; it made me care about what was real.

* * *

[Enter Father Time & BigMama Money]

“We can make more money, but we can never make more time.” Which makes me very possessive of the latter, and for better or worse, care less and less for the former.

On days I get to write all day, I feel very rich indeed.

The long and the long of it is — I have a new project: Buy the Hour

I’ve decided to pay for everything in hours, rather than dollars. When I go out and see a slick new pair of polarized sunglasses I just *need* to have, instead of asking myself Is this material possession really worth X amount of dollars? I ask myself,

Is this really worth X hours of my _life_?

When it’s matched up against whether or not I get X hours instead to write, or hike, or laugh with my grandfather as we snap green beans into our mouths directly from the vine–

–the answer is usually No.

Money has never been the most important thing to me, but I like what it affords, and it is darn important to other people. Slowly, other people’s priorities became my priorities, through a process of cultural osmosis. I’m reversing that. Now, when I get rung up at Peet’s I’ll hear,

“One Jasmine Pearl tea to go? That’ll be 1.2 minutes of your life, please.”