Timekeeper

The timekeeper is an old witch of a person who lives deep inside you. She rises at the crack of dawn already with a scowl on her face. She is constantly peering over your shoulder and beating you with her broomstick. She tells you that no matter what you’re doing, you’re doing it too slowly.

Or maybe the timekeeper for you is a soccer referee, always with a deep furrow in his brow. Maybe you just enjoy playing soccer, messing around with the ball, doing some popping and juggling. But just as soon as you start to play, the referee gets out his stopwatch. As soon as you slip up or go off track, he’ll blow his whistle.

The timekeeper never goes away, at least he/she hasn’t for me (I have a few), but I’ve found little ways to keep them at bay. Some days I wake up and I tell myself that the timekeeper is on holiday today. He’s away for the week, taken his family to see Niagara Falls. Then I go about my activities for the day, one after the next, without a single thought about the time. If I start to feel uneasy and wonder whether I’m behind, I just tell myself he’s at Niagara Falls, remember? With his family. He’ll be back next week, and then I can be a responsible, punctual person again. For this week, we’ll just have to fend for ourselves and see how things go.

The other trick I like to play is to send the timekeeper out on an errand. For instance, I’ll tell him, could you please remember to call the welder at 3:00 p.m. about the mast spreaders? I know that by doing this, I’ve bought myself a break between now and 3:00 p.m. because all he’s going to focus on between now and then is remembering that call to the welder. The effect of doing this is that now he’s out on an errand and won’t be back till 3. So we have some time to ourselves. We can just breathe and go about our activities.

Another good trick is to put the timekeeper down for a nap. Timekeepers are very resistant to leave their duties, so it’s hard to get them off your back. But if you hold up your phone and show the timekeeper that you are setting a timer – I’m going to work on this for exactly one hour, see?—then she’ll feel comfortable to go and lie down. She knows that the infallible timer on your smartphone will keep you on track. She doesn’t need to keep an eye on you for that hour.

My problem has never been focus. Once I get the timekeeper off my back, my creative self can dive right in and get her hands dirty. She loves diving into things, when she’s left to her own devices. She can just run free and play and create. She produces her best work when no one is checking in on her, kind of like when I was a kid and I knew my mom was busy making dinner and I was just allowed to play outside wherever I wanted without anyone watching me. I knew I was alone. I knew I was totally free – it felt like this delicious secret. It’s that same feeling of secret freedom that inspires the Creative. She just loves it.

But the timekeeper keeps coming back, like an overbearing parent. If you live in today’s so-called modern society, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have a timekeeper living in your head too. They take the joy out of play. They turn every activity into a job. And no matter how long you take to do something, you’re never doing it quickly enough for the timekeeper.

I’m hopeful that if I can trick my way around my timekeeper enough times, eventually he or she (every day it changes) will just go away for good. The referee will finally retire somewhere in the suburbs where he can police his own grandchildren as they run around the yard, rather than policing me. And the old witch, well maybe she’ll just find a cozy hollow somewhere where she can lie and wait and trap unsuspecting wanderers as they pass by. I understand their intentions are noble (at least according to them) and that the effort they must exert to keep me in line is extraordinary, but their talents of timekeeping are wasted on me. My Creative doesn’t want supervision anymore, thank you very much.

I wonder if it’s this underlying problem that we don’t fully trust our creative selves to do what’s in our best interests. Maybe we think that our Creative is selfish and childish and doesn’t understand how to really survive in the world. Maybe that’s true, but on the other hand, maybe the Creative is actually wiser than us because of her simplicity, and maybe that wisdom is what really counts for long-term survival, not the referee’s scorekeeping or the witch’s hocus-pocus.

It’s hard for me to believe, as an animal scientist, that we humans aren’t actually meant to do what we’re being called to do. I mean, every other animal follows their inner leadings and motivations, and those leadings and motivations have been shaped through millennia of natural selection in favor of survival, so why can’t we trust our own human inner leadings and motivations? How come an anemonefish who is called to eat or mate should be allowed to act on that motivation, but we are supposed to suppress our own motivations to paint or write and instead do what our timekeeper considers to be “productive” and a “good use of time”?

I don’t understand this turning on ourselves that we’re being asked to do. How is it natural? How is it healthy? And yet, we are often so focused on doing the “right thing” as defined by society that we hardly ever stop to consider whether this “right thing” is actually what our human bodies and souls want. Let alone stop and consider who made it the “right thing” in the first place.

I like words for the pleasure of words. I feel called to write them because I love the sound of a good turn of phrase. It brings pleasure to my ears and tickles my cheeks and gives me a feeling akin to the jaw satisfaction of a crunch through a good crust. The timekeeper would tell me that this satisfaction of my inner leading is not reason enough to write, that I must do it to achieve commercial success … thankfully the timekeeper is on leave seeing the Grand Tetons, I hear, so for today at least I don’t have to care.