The Gift of Time
This week I have a couple of observations about the human brain.
By “human brain” I mean my own tiny mind so feel free to grab a pinch of salt as you read, though none of us is so different from each other and the pattern may hold.
First observation is that you might not be able to teach an old dog a new trick, but the dog might remember an old trick from ages ago. Woof.
During my ten days as a storyteller resident with “In Other Words Ōtaki”, I was kindly loaned a car. It was a manual, and it’s been a long time since I’ve managed a stick-shift. At first there was stalling and bunny-hopping, an embarrassment exacerbated by the indicator being on an unfamiliar side, so I’d conk out at a corner with the windscreen wipers shrieking.
But muscle memory is a thing and after a day or two I was tootling round town like Mario Andretti’s nana.
My second observation relates to this concept floating around of a universal basic income. I’ve long liked the idea that every citizen could be guaranteed enough for food and shelter for the same reasons I’m passionate that education and healthcare are available to all.
But some of us suspect people might then sit about doing nothing, living off other people’s taxes. Just quietly, some of us wonder we might be like ourselves, and what would motivate us get out of bed in the morning.
I pondered this before my Ōtaki residency. With all my basic needs cared for – a lovely place to stay for free and vouchers for the supermarket - what would I do? Would I sleep all day? Read books? Watch movies? Stay up late drinking wine and dancing? Or possibly be so overwhelmed with gratitude to be liberated from the banal I might just curl up and cry?
Turns out that if you give me the gift of time, I will use it to write my head off. My brain calmed. Ideas floated in. I planned new things, fixed existing things, started days with blank pages and filled them with words I looked at the next day and liked.
I got out of my chair sometimes – there were daily “thinky-walks” on the beach to get body and brain moving, and there was one whole day in the middle when my mind refused to focus on what I’d planned, so I explored the town, then read instead.
My other urge was to share what I’d been creating – I took a storytelling workshop and, on the last day at community event, read aloud a new essay.
This was the first moment in my life I’d been able to wholly devote a chunk of time to being creative. No domestic labour (apart from feeding myself), no “other job” to pay the bills. No multitasking, juggling, squeezing, flicking my brain from one thing to another. It gave me time to wonder - what if I’d been able to do this sooner, and more often? And how many of us might love the chance to get good at doing something we love?
My suspicion is we are all hardwired to be productive - beyond the need to survive. That once our basic needs are met, we don’t just sit there, we do something, and then share it.
Home now, and working out ways to carve out more of this “time” thing. Also relearning that my own car doesn’t have a clutch, and the indicator is on the right.