Time is only your enemy when you try to kill it.
I have a very boring job a lot of the time. I mean, not all the time. For spurts of my five hours a night, I am engaged, present, smart, eloquent, passionate, talking about theatre, selling memberships, listening to people, giving and giving and giving and taking them to that sale. I sell hard, and when it works, it works. It's always a thrilling feeling.
But then there are hours, and I do mean hours, where I barely make contact with anyone. I dial number after number. I tick away the minutes and I try not to think about what else I could be doing. I do make a decent hourly wage, but the money's not in sitting around listening to answering machines. It's about making contact with people. Connecting. Inspiring them, with passion, about the season of theatre they need tickets for. Bringing them around to the sale. Now's the time! No day but today! It's about being a human being on the phone, already a mission of translation, and being a human being who can mobilize others into action.
It's hard to stay an action-inspiring human when the hours are rotting by. When there is no action. When you're bored. David Foster Wallace has a whole bit in The Pale King, where he has noted that the use of the word "boring" as an adjective appeared at the same time the word "interesting," one of the most soporific and un-useful words to ever cross an artist's brainpan. How "boring" also comes from the verb to bore, meaning to pierce with a turning or twisting movement of a tool. Violent image, eh? How you can imagine that tool going into your skull, because something's got to when no one will answer the damn phone.
I think we as a culture have become pathologically afraid of that particular kind of pain, of boredom. I certainly am. Normally I do whatever it takes outside of my shifts at work to escape boredom. On trains, on days off, even when I want to do nothing and relax, I feel guilty for letting myself get bored. For wasting time. I open up 16 tabs on my browser, I refresh Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, I read news sites, I look up useless facts, I play Dominion on my iPhone, all so I can avoid being alone with myself. All so I can avoid being bored. All so I can avoid feeling like I'm wasting the precious minutes I have, rotting down until the moment I have to return to work.
David Foster Wallace would say that if you can break past the initial pain of boredom, though, if you can handle that slow dull tool making its way millimeter by millimeter into your skull, you can actually break past onto the other side into a feeling of deep serenity, of calm, of presence. A Buddhist, meditative notion. A kind of self-acceptance.
Louis CK says it even better here. He talks about boredom leading to being alone with yourself, which inevitably opens you up to all kinds of intense feelings of unknowable sadness you feel about yourself, about your existence, about life in general. And how if you can let yourself feel that sad, if you can stop the urge to contact everyone you know, and say HI I'M HERE PLEASE LOVE ME, you can actually feel happy you get to feel sad, you can appreciate its beauty and its place in your life. Everything has to be someplace, even your sadness. You come to acknowledge and respect it as part of yourself. You come to love yourself a little bit more. And then you move a little bit on.
Which makes me think about perspective.
This Wait But Why article about Time's Perspective, using all kinds of simple, beautiful graphics to illustrate just how much of a blip in time we as human beings really are, in the face of so many years, billions of years, it made me feel the same way I felt first hearing Carl Sagan's speech about the Pale Blue Dot. About how infinitesimal we are, but also how momentary, how effervescent. For as how long it's taken for us to learn language, to develop technologies, to create civilizations, to make the art that fills the great museums of the world, it barely takes up an inch on the scale of how long we've been anatomically human.
As the Wait But Why article says, "If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second."
When I worked at the PMA as a telemarketer, we'd get breaks. 15 minute breaks every hour and 15 minutes. And I used to really look forward to those breaks after a mind-numbing hour, because at least I'd be able to stand and stretch and grouse with the other callers about how I wasn't making any sales, etc. But I also used to physically dread those breaks, too, because I would usually spend most of my time anxiously looking at my phone, watching the minutes of freedom bleed down until I had to go back to work.
I'd waste my entire break from work dreading about going back to work. Not that I necessarily hated working, I actually like it most of the time, even when I don't make sales or get a slue of assholes on the phone, I generally like talking to people, I generally like talking about art and theatre. I like my current job a lot (which doesn't offer the trap of breaks, we just use the restroom when we need to). But I still dreaded getting back from those breaks so much, I rarely took an actual break.
Don't tell me you haven't done this. Don't tell me you haven't wasted a day or two of a vacation occupying the same space of dread.
Why do we do that? Why do we waste time dreading going back to work?
Or, to pose another question, why do we consider time we have not worked to be wasteful?
I'm being a little care-free with the "we," I mean you totally could be one of those enlightened people or Europeans who believe in the value of relaxing and promote a lax sense of time and due dates and long siestas and time really slowing down, so you can appreciate the small stuff and enjoy all that's around you. I envy you, if you exist in this world. I want to carve places in my life where I can live by those rules.
But we have to be productive to be in American society, don't we? In Western society, in North American society. We are a capitalist nation, you either win or you lose, you either waste or you produce, and being bored, being idle, being, well, that doesn't generate anything, that doesn't make anything you can sell society, so it's useless, it's bad, don't do it, stop daydreaming, Mark, get back to work. Quit being lazy. Quit thinking so much. Just do it. Get it done. Work harder, work faster, dial dia dial. These are things I tell myself frequently, especially when I'm feeling guilty for losing my way into a reverie.
Of course I can't actually day dream on the job, because in sales you have to be present. You have to be at the top of your game. And when I'm on a call, nothing else matters. No day but today. (I work for the theatre who created Rent, so excuse the constant reference) When I'm doing it right nothing else matters, which is very hard to do.
When I drop off the last 37 minutes of non-starts and wrong numbers, and I simply focus on connecting to the other intelligent living breathing being on the other line, minutes fly by. Work becomes play. I love talking about the upcoming season. The plays. The excitement. How meaningful membership is. I know they get it. I just need to bring them there.
And when it works, when it's the right time, when I've done my job right, out comes the wallet, and in comes the sale. Because it's not about cheap tickets or dollars and cents. It's about the theatre. It's about the mission. It's about the art, and wanting to stay connected to it. In those minutes I'm just being that guy, the guy who loves to talk about those things. Who means what he says.
My job is teaching me how to be better at doing that when I'm not talking to someone else. When I'm idle, dialing numbers, waiting, trying to keep a positive outlook, keep my energy and focus for the next call. I am trying, outside of my work, to both embrace the time I have to focus, to do things like write, create, research, read, stay in touch with people. But I'm also trying to do something that's maybe harder than all that other stuff: I'm trying not to feel bad for wasting time.
Because there's no such thing as a waste of time. All the errata, all the bullshit, all the nonsense, all the long lines in the supermarket, all the boring surfaces we attach our butts to as we wait for trains and planes and postal office workers, all of it matters. It does!
All of it contributes to that one second we as a human race, in the history of the universe, have been in existence. And there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our philosophies, we have no idea what bit of information we glean from those resting moments will be the KEY to our future endeavours, if we stop resisting the times when we feel we are wasting away, we might actually eventually be able to pay attention and see what's in front of us. We're the only ones who think that negatively about it. And it's a choice, to think about it that way.
This, too, comes from David Foster Wallace, in the deeply moving excerpt from his Kenyon 2005 graduation speech, the excerpt being redubbed This Is Water. If you haven't clicked on any of the other hyperlinks, click on this one. I dare you to wait in a line at the grocery store the same way again.
I'll wait until you come back.
At the end of this, I wanted to draw some larger conclusion about perspective and time and human history and art and life and boredom and pain and how that deep feeling of aloneness and the fear of the meaninglessness of our lives, how all of this can simply be overcome by not thinking about it. Don't pay attention to it. But I don't really think that's true. I certainly can't help it, when I'm down, that I criticize all my choices, I beat myself up for the mistakes I've made, I wish I had used this time better or said this thing to this person. I am constantly trying to overcome my own ruthless inner critic.
I think it's resisting the resistance that's the problem. I think it's feeling bad for feeling bad. It's not letting the defeatism be defeated. It's thinking that your struggles right now are more significant, more important, than the grand scheme of your whole life.
Last year, I made a few decisions that radically changed my life. I decided to visit a college friend for her birthday, took the time waiting for the train, riding the train, walking through the night air, the first time it smelled like fall to me, to arrive at my friend's door. I agonized over missing out on Fringe shows and on risking delays getting back to run my own. But something made me want to think bigger than just what was happening right then. I think I wanted to network with this friend's grad school friends, since I was thinking about applying myself. I put up with a lot of boring inaction, I went through a lot of motions, I sank and sunk into all this negative thinking, but then I met this woman who became the love of my life.
Now my life is almost entirely different. In the span of a year, which is now 1/26th of my life, everything has changed.
And I sit alone, with myself, writing to you, which is really also writing to myself, too, hi, and while I'm still plagued by wanting to be productive, to launch this New York artistic career, to make things happen, and simultaneously feeling lazy and slothful and afraid of taking steps and being wrong, afraid of trying and failing, afraid of feeling the bad feelings that one needs to feel to learn, even in spite of those fears, for the first time in a long time, I am very much looking forward to the years and years ahead. I can see them, dimly, stretch and stand in the horizon. Seeing it, knowing it's possible, that long view, takes the pressure off making every moment of now count, I think.
It all counts, but there's a lot to count. A lot. Life is very long, as a mentor near to my heart told me in New York a year before I moved here. It's time to remember, continually, to let it go. Or, as any Viewpoints teacher worth their salt would say, hold on tightly, let go lightly.
I think I've finished moralizing for the day.
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Oh, also, a moment of unabashed excitement:
I finally did this! I finally wrote on my blog again! Happy birthday to me!
