Open Writing

My Creative Writing class is in two hours’ time! I haven’t even begun to write! Every second counts now! Sit down at the computer and just start writing – any old how!

The exam is tomorrow! Of course I can’t sleep – every time I start to drift off, a terrifying thought shocks into my mind: that section on existentialism (or logical trees or Heidegger or whatever)... you haven’t memorized the key phrases properly! Get up! Put on the bedside light. You can’t afford to sleep. Every second counts.

Now here I am in the exam. The pressure to perform is unbearable. I am trying to write so fast that I doubt if the examiner will be able to read a word of it. But I must get it all down, I must, I must. What a waste and a shame and an embarrassment if I don’t. Oh, I can’t bear this pressure; perhaps I’ll collapse. No. Forge ahead. Every second counts.

“I’m miscarrying! I’m pouring blood. I’ll bleed to death if I don’t get to the hospital immediately! Every second counts! Hurry! Hurry!”

“The guard patrol has just turned the corner. It’s now or never! To hesitate even fractionally will lose all of us our lives! Run like the devil! Every second counts! Cut the fence, Peter!”

“The boat is sinking! She’ll be sucked down – and us with her! Throw yourselves into that lifeboat and row like hell! Every second counts!”

“Wake up! Wake up! If we don’t get out of this wreck she’ll explode! Every second counts! Wake up! Wake up!”

“The assassin will aim his long-range gun at the President in precisely one hundred seconds’ time. You have to stop him! Every second counts!”

“The timer is set to explode the bomb in ninety minutes from now. We have to find it and figure out how to defuse it! Every second counts!”

“My darling only son is leaving for America tomorrow; permanently! These are the last few hours I’ll ever have him at home here with me! Make the most of them! Every second counts!”

Act now! Do it now! Just do it! Just in the nick of time! There’s a right time for everything. “There is There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” (Julius Caesar). [And Byron said: “A tide in the affairs of women, Which, taken at the flood, leads - God knows where.” (Don Juan)].

Advertising focuses heavily on time-saving devices – cleaning machines, packaged foods. There are ergonomic companies that scientifically establish the most labour-saving methods to achieve the desired ends. I always loved the delightful true story – Cheaper By The Dozen, in which the father Frank Galbraith – an ergonomics expert – had his twelve children learning languages while they slept; bathing in a set pattern while listening to an educational tape, and so on.

Oh life! Oh people! Oh pressures! Oh time squeezes! Deadlines – people get sick because of deadlines. Roosevelt – in a famous 1942 radio address, said: “Never before had we so little time in which to do so much”. We haven’t the time to take our time.” (Ionesco) We are too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet.

Yes, there are life-threatening emergencies, when seconds may very well mean the difference between life and death, but the trouble is that we so often treat these other non-life-threatening “every second counts” occasions as if they were life-threatening – and that’s why we come to be perpetually hyper-stressed and hyper-anxious. All the other kinds of “every second counts” situations need to be examined carefully.

Everyone wants more hours in the day, but – as the famous saying goes - most people who long for immortality don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon. There are never enough hours in a day, but always too many days before Saturday. “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we rushed through life trying to save.” (Will Rogers’ Autobiography.) We so often talk of “killing time”.

And too often our “every second counts” crises and heart-stopping, gut-twisting pressures are the fruit of our vices; our greediness to achieve more, our vanity, our pride, our destructively competitive drives to be better than others. Or – more kindly – they show so nakedly our lack of self-esteem. If I come brilliantly top in this exam how I will bask in everybody’s admiration! I’ll feel that I am valuable, worthwhile. Covey talks about ‘putting all your efforts into climbing a ladder, and then discovering that it’s against the wrong wall.’ Scott Peck put it in a nutshell: “Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything [truly worthwhile] with it.” If we spent our money as we spend our time, we’d be bankrupt very quickly!

Then there’s another problem connected with “every second counts”: why is it that I generally need the whip of extreme time pressure, of a looming deadline, before I can finally set pen to paper – or boot up my computer – and get creative with my writing project? The sad fact is that if I’m not forced to perform by a deadline, chances are high that I will do nothing! Perhaps this comes back to the lack of self-esteem once more? Perhaps it’s laziness? Or a mixture of the two? And even then, what precisely is it that semi-forces me to get writing? Vanity? Fear? Oh well – motives are seldom pure, and overall, it’s probably better to write for motives that include some not worthy of our truest self than not to write at all.

But our lives are indeed a kind of bank account in which every second counts. Are we doing the right sort of budgeting? The idea of saving time calls up the old saying: penny-wise, pound-foolish -meaning thrifty in small matters, while foolish in large ones. How did I spend today? All those millions and billions of seconds in my long years on earth – have I made them count? Have I stopped to smell the roses? Have I looked after my health? Have I cherished my family and friends? Have I made the world a better place? Another old saying: take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves: the pennies add up to the pounds, and the seconds add up to the big picture of my life. Every second reveals who I am, what my values really are.

Seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years wash us along in their inexorable tide. And in the end – no matter how well or how badly we have made each second count - “Time is a reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked.” (Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit).

But the image of shipwreck is a rather violent and depressing one. I far prefer the gentle words of Marie Ray: “We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand – and melting like a snowflake.”