Wasting Time

I learned as a child was that it was wrong to waste anything, especially time.  What wasn’t clear to me was what, exactly, wasting time was.  I wasn’t sure which of my activities were wastes of time and which were not.  Could something I do be a waste of time once, and not a waste of time another on another occasion?  How about if I was doing something that I had to do, but I really hated doing it?  That might sure feel like a waste of time.  And I might not do it at all.

I learned, or didn’t learn, these lessons in the context of a Catholic school education.  Anything wrong was a sin, so if wasting time was wrong, wasting time was a sin.  Therefore, I was a sinner, because so much of what I did seemed like such a waste of time.  And through the concept of sin, I became acquainted with the concept of guilt.

Wasting time and feeling guilty, I have carried these burdens with me, like a sack over my shoulder, from childhood, into adulthood (not to be confused with maturity), and now, into my galloping senility.  Every job I ever had was a waste of time, but the only thing I felt guilty about  was my half-assed effort.  But not that guilty, since the job was a waste of time in the first place.  I felt  resentful about not being able to have a “meaningful” job, because I had to make a living with this “waste of time” job.

At the present time, I don’t need to have a job to pay my bills.  I am retired, that means that I cannot any longer blame what I do, or don’t do, on my “waste of time” job that sucked the life out of me.  For the first time, in this respect, I had to rely on myself entirely.    It took an intense period of fasting, meditation, and prayer, but I think I’m onto something.  Not true, I just thought about it.

Time is time.  It can’t be wasted, it can only be used.  Used more productively, used less productively.  It seemed a rational, philosophic compromise.  But the problem arose with the apportioning of guilt.  More or less productive means pretty much the same as, more or less a waste of time.  Still a sin.  So it’s just “old wine in new bottles.”

It takes me a long time to figure things out, and I finally, sort of, figured out the wasting time part, but I was having trouble getting rid of the sticky guilty shit that hadn’t been used up from years past.  I would feel guilty if I spent most of the day playing video games and binge watching old TV show,  just  jerking-off  (metaphorically).   Self-medication was only partially effective.

Then, one day during a lucid moment I realized, that while I do spend a lot of time in, what could be described as, unproductive activities, I also do lots of other shit as well.  I keep the Cave relatively neat.  I do laundry once in a while.  I cook.  I read.  I putter. (NB: I refer to creative activities as ‘puttering’, since I am neither a real artist, nor a real writer.)

And now I remind myself, at bedtime and several times during the day, that just because I didn’t produce provocative, insightful essays, or spell-binding fiction, or watercolor masterpieces, doesn’t mean I was wasting my time, necessarily.   Often I have mundane tasks to attend to before I can get to puttering.