Photo by Argyro Nicolaou
Who would have thought that having all this unexpected spare time would be this hard. Posed to me as a hypothetical in the midst of a busy work week, the prospect of an indefinite number of days working from home with all social / professional obligations cancelled would have seemed like heaven. Think of all the writing I could get done. All those ideas I would finally get to hammer out, in scripts, op-eds, articles, pitches etc. Turns out that as a lived experience, an indefinite amount of unstructured time is pretty unnerving. I’ll admit that I’ve never had a harder time actually doing something.
To mitigate this novel feeling, I’ll be posting one thing I actually do each day. I think of this both as a kind of diary, which can help me keep tabs on this surreal, time-bending moment that turns hours into days and days into hours, and as a resource for people reading, who may be looking for ideas on how to spend those chunks of time, big or small, that are now making themselves available whether we want to or not.
Today: a poem
Shy Spring
It’s a shy spring out there.
The trees keep time when time is all but scarce.
Spare time.
Sparingly spread across the days and weeks
It drips
Into a bucket and
Drip by drip
It overflows
And in its wake
I glide
along ghost streets
and shuttered restaurants.
Today
is yesterday
and in a week
I’ll wake
and stretch myself across the days
Touching my fingers with my toes
Coiling into another hour
Seamlessly