Make Time Physical

Stay obsessed.

That art you love to make? Keep making it.

Here’s today’s reminder why, from this passage I stumbled across on the “@letterstoyourlove” Insta account’s stories:

“I remember that feeling of teenage obsession, and I miss it desperately. Few things about our everyday lives are more genuinely magical to me than the way that loving something with commitment can rewire your understanding of time: instead of dates or semesters, I can place moments of my early life inside the year where I only read Vonnegut, the month I first loved The Smiths, the autumn I spent with that Rilke poem. It manages to make time physical — it turns it into something that can be tasted and touched. I want my life to be textured by the periods I spent perfecting a stone fruit hot honey cake or watching murder mysteries. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to one day taste a cake and remember how you felt in September?”

“Make time physical.”

That’s what art’s doing for us — the art we love, and the art we make.

Keep making.

I’m in the middle of multiple pressing deadlines right now, but I still find myself drawn to spend at least half an hour a day, often an hour or two more, on a novel I’ve been working on for years, for more than a decade. And now it’s taking shape in a way it never possibly could have ten years ago, because I didn’t understand life at all back then. What’s most interesting about this is how I see my work on this novel now doing for me what I’ve heard about happening for so many other people over the years: It feeds me.

I could go on, but alas, I have that work to do.

And so do you.

Go make that thing you keep thinking about making. Write that thing. Make that music. Draw that picture. Paint that painting. Fill yourself up.

This is the antidote to all that life throws our way that can burn us out. I’ve borrowed that line directly from this passage from the writer Brad Stulberg:

“One of the biggest problems of our times: alienation — a sense of remove from your life that leads to emptiness, exhaustion, and burnout.

The antidote: finding things you care about and giving them your all.

It can be a person, a sport, a musical instrument, an art, a craft — so long as you find it worthwhile.

Focusing on things you care about is key to a good life. Full stop.”