all we have is time

The bus has been late every day this week, so by Friday, I just sit there at the stop and I type and type some words in my notes app, with little concern for when the bus arrives, because even late, it always comes. My boyfriend's best friend was asking me this the other day: „do you still have time for your art, now that you have a full time job?" My answer was brief, but the reflection is ongoing: all we have, really, is time, and despite what we think, what we’re told, whatever, time is actually abundant. We can have as much time as we're willing to take, and we can take as much as we need. To not take the time we're given, is just a matter of focus, of priority, of choice even, it has nothing to do with how much time is available. And time had nothing to do with the twelve numbers engraved on a clock.

I had to go back to trading time for money (i.e. being someone's employee) to realize that art happens during, beyond, above the 40-hour work week. And some days I forget, but others I'm reminded, often by something minuscule, that those 40 hours are really mine, no one else's. They're mine. Have you seen Perfect Days yet? It is now my favorite movie and it's exactly this: to be enveloped in something to marvel at at all times, even when "most" of the time is spent "at work", because even if that's the deal (you're here 8 hours/day and you have to do this, this, this and this; you really get to choose how to spend this time. I mean, you choose how to exist in it. We're not really bound by the time constraint or whatever contract we signed, more so by the deal we make with ourselves on how to be, where to look, what to see, what to search for. That we can always decide. This decision making is an art in itself, and I haven't mastered it by any means, but I'm practicing as much as I can.

In Perfect Days, our protagonist never misses an opportunity to notice, to play, to observe, to reflect, to do the best he can, even—especially—while cleaning public toilets in silence. And why wouldn't he? All he has is time. As long as I can be somewhere, as long as I can be absolutely anywhere and just wonder, there is art to make and time to make it. And it's not hard to make the time, when time makes itself easy to take, and that's when you perceive it as easy to take, when you make it easy for yourself to take it. When an idea hits, I take it. When a picture forms in front of me, I take it. The ambient sounds, I take. The conversations, the impressions, I take them all with me. All these things exist in time, not outside of it. To take them, is to take time. The bus, I also take. I let it take me. And there, I watch. I listen. I write. I'm writing this from the bus. I write all the time. Even when I don't. There is a world to write with no pen nor keyboard. Poetry really is note taking with your senses. My notes app is full and so are my eyes and my ears and my hands, fuller even. Some notes I can only take with my body, and my body is always somewhere, in some moment. The moment always smells of something and there is always something in it to taste, no matter what it looks like. As long as I can sense, there is art to make, and my senses know no time constraints. And I obviously didn't tell him all that, to him I just said: „yes, I do have the time, actually."