While I have never wished for time to hustle by faster (except maybe when I was a kid and always wanted to be older), this year of covid, well, I think we all wish it was in the rearview.
In spite of all the chaos, sadness and serious loss on all fronts (maybe because of it), these months in quarantine and constant worry have been highly creative for me. The absolute falling away of activities outside the home, away from the studio has stitched the hours and the days together in a way that, turns out, I desperately needed in order to get anything done.
My natural rhythm is to work on various projects at once, moving from desk to drafting table to photo studio to sewing machine. For many years I thought this was a sign of weakness, indecision, ambivalence; now I see it as a sign of strength. I have a lot of languages and I like to use them all, practice, get more fluent. Only in my artist fantasy life did I sit at one thing for days, weeks, months, years until some masterful behemoth of a piece was complete. My real life? Nothing at all like that!
The laundry has to get done and I prefer to do it when my head is flipping thoughts around, not when I have a precious portion of time to let thinking become doing become making become thinking again. Same with watering the plants, cleaning the sink, vacuuming, giving the toilet a scrub. I’ll fit it in when I need to get up because my butt is sore. I’ll do it when it becomes the one thing that must get done today.
Remove all the trips out of the house, and there is far more time to appoint to the important things, to the creative process, to the busy mind that (seldom) rests inside my head, to the deep emotional intelligence that lives inside me. Finally, thanks in part to the pandemic, I am staying put long enough to hear myself think, and to begin speaking out loud.