Carving Out Time
5 minute read
When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room Of One’s Own, she was referring to a woman’s need for – and right to – time as much as space. Although almost a century old – the extended essay was first published in 1929 – the tug of war women play between ‘duty’ and downtime still exists, especially for those of us in midlife, firefighting the competing demands of work, children, parents and partners. While it’s well documented that women take responsibility for the majority of household chores as well as the emotional load of looking after their immediate and extended families’ needs, philanthropist Melinda Gates quantified these additional burdens in stark terms when she explained in her 2019 book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, that women spend a full seven years more than men performing unpaid tasks throughout their lives. Wow. Just think of all the books you could read, movies you could watch, walks you could explore and friends you could find time for, were you able to claw back even half of those 2,555 days.
In our modern world, time is a currency more valuable than gold and more difficult to accumulate. Last year’s series of lockdowns gave us a flavour of this precious commodity, and just as polyester is no substitute for silk once you’ve enjoyed the feel and fall of a non-synthetic fabric, time is outstripping money, fame and followers as the indicator of success and happiness. This is because time bestows freedom and choice and control, all of which men have been fortunate enough to benefit from since the dawn of time by virtue of their gender. But it seems to me that women are continually fighting a losing battle against time, and as a result, we’re missing out on being our best selves because as author Maya Angelou said: “All great achievements require time.” She wasn’t simply referring to the actual time it takes to create or build something meaningful, but also the time required around that endeavour; time to think, sleep, rest, reflect.
Perhaps we are our own worst enemies? I know women who still feel ‘less than’ if they’re not on the go 24/7. They’ve mythologised that “endless to-do list”, but its effect has been to pathologize the quiet time we all need to function properly as wasteful or lazy. But in the same way that more haste means less speed, maybe by doing more, we’re achieving less? In The Moment of Lift, Gates described “the chores of a day killing the dreams of a lifetime”. It’s an interesting point, although the one I’m making here is that downtime is important for its own sake alone, not only as a means to some great creative end. Surely we should each be able to carve out 30 minutes a day entirely for ourselves and feel justified in doing little more with it than sitting down with a cuppa or glancing through those saved-up Sunday supplements?
Downtime, for me, is different to ‘me-time’, which often involves exercising, meditation, yoga or gardening, and which in today’s social media-mad world inevitably leads to a quick Facebook or Insta post.
Downtime, on the other hand, is that unbroken half-hour of solitude and stillness (it used to be called elevenses or fourses when I was a child) that’s utterly and wonderfully unworthy of an Instagram post.
But over the past decade, or two, this has been lost in the flurry to multitask and achieve multi-hyphen status. I can’t be the only woman in midlife who has felt terrorised by this punishing standard over the past few years? Multi-hyphen is a good buzzword, certainly, and a great example of how quickly a zeitgeisty phrase can transform an innocuous idea into an exhausting ideal.
So I was intrigued by the concept of “time millionaires”, which I came across in The Guardian last week. The article asked if time rather than money should be our great aspiration, and it described the current crop of time millionaires as individuals who “measure their worth not in terms of financial capital, but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation.” Could time be the modern-day status symbol? Of course, all of the time millionaires quoted in this piece were men, because for them, stepping back from their careers almost always creates time that’s strictly for themselves, but for women shouldering the majority of their household’s unpaid work, extricating themselves from responsibility and enjoying unfettered quiet time is a much more complex process.
But I like the phrase time millionaire – much better than I like multi-hyphen woman – and I like the idea of being one. Certainly I think I’ve a greater chance of becoming a time millionaire than an actual millionaire, plus there’s no six euro weekly outlay to the lottery. But how do we get there? Almost 90 years ago, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called In Praise of Idleness. In it, he proclaimed that, “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work...” Pre-pandemic I think I would have scoffed at this idea, but now not so much. Before Covid, everything in my life was squeezed in around a 9-5 job and the out-of-hours events that went with it. Today, as a freelancer working from home, the rhythm of my week has a slower beat, yet I’m almost as busy. But I’ve carved back certain times for myself, like breakfast. Rather than eating in front of a screen while responding to early morning emails as I used to, breakfast is now 40 (very relaxed) minutes in my kitchen listening to Morning Ireland. It’s my favourite time of the day.
For those of you with children, this is probably a pipe dream, but maybe it’s the half hour after you drop them to school and before you sit at your desk (if you haven’t returned to the restrictions of a 9am start in an office) that you take ownership of? It was American motivation guru Tim Ferris who said, “Win the morning, win the day”, so maybe this is the time of day we should all begin to try salvaging for ourselves? I’ve posed the question of how to carve out downtime without delivering any kind of satisfying answer, I know. But it’s a tough one. The juggle is real as they say. But maybe if we stop glamorizing the grind, eulogising the endless struggle and strive to be time millionaires instead, we might come up with some solutions.
Marie Kelly, October 2021
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