Dripping water hollows out stone.
—Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto IV
From time to time on my blog, I offer “time makeovers” to people who are willing to let me write about them. Laureen Marchand, a sixty-six-year-old Canadian artist who lives in Saskatchewan, wrote me in the summer of 2016 that she thought she could use some help. She told me that she was “not as productive” as she wanted to be, and in the beginning of our correspondence, she seemed to be looking for standard advice on getting more done. She noted that she was frequently distracted from her creative work. Her one-week time log showed that she was working forty-one hours at her various commitments, including supervising an artist residency program, dealing with administrative matters, and working part-time at a local grocery store. Only twelve of these work hours, however, were spent on her top priority of making art.
She wanted this ratio to change, so I gave some advice from the previous chapter: pay yourself first. When you are combining creative, speculative work with professional activities, if you wait until the end of the day or the end of the week to make art, there may not be time left over. But if you carve out time on Monday morning for such work—as Katherine Reynolds Lewis did with her pitching—it will get done.
Marchand thought this sounded sensible. She would aim to make it to the studio on Monday by 9:30 A.M., and on any other day that wasn’t committed as well.
A while later, however, she wrote back to tell me that she had just experienced an incredibly frustrating week. She was also realizing some things about her life and work that she wanted to share with me.
Marchand, I learned, had built an impressive artistic career over the prior decades, exhibiting in more than two dozen solo and two-person shows, and in forty group shows. You might think this describes a cosmopolitan artist, but in fact she lives “literally in the middle of nowhere.” Her village of Val Marie has about 130 people. The nearest substantial town is seventy-five miles away. The area, right by Canada’s Grasslands National Park, is ruggedly beautiful enough to justify the artist residency program she supervised at the time, and she is well plugged in to her small community (the grocery store gig was as much about seeing her neighbors as anything else). The remoteness, however, has drawbacks. She needed to drive long distances when she had a doctor appointment, or needed to pick up supplies. If she needed service people to come to her house, she was truly at their mercy because they would only come to Val Marie when they wanted to come to Val Marie.
“I’m glad I moved here because I love the landscape and the lower cost of living,” she told me. But “it does add a layer of difficulty to managing an artistic career, especially as I’m 66 and my energy is not getting greater every year.”
Logistical issues are what they are, but on top of that, “earlier this year I had what I now recognize was a burnout and a creative block at the same time. I’m still working my way back from those,” she said. “I’m a slow producer at the best of times, and this definitely wasn’t the best.”
So that was the background for the annoying week that followed her original log, in which she “had every kind of interruption—medical, job-related, contract-related, plumbing. I agree completely about spending the best time of the day on the most important thing, so on Monday morning I made a list of all the other tasks that were calling, which enabled me to put them off for later, and I got almost six studio hours.”
Unfortunately, though, “this was the last time in the week that happened.”
Tuesday she drove seventy miles round-trip to a rural health clinic for a fasting blood test. Some complication occurred in this, and so “that turned into another trip of the same distance the next morning, Wednesday, for the same thing.” Later on Wednesday morning, the plumber came to install a new water pump on her well, and the latest resident artist left. “I did manage some studio time in each afternoon, but it was less than I wanted. Thursday was my job day”—that is, the grocery store gig—“which instead of being just the morning, lasted six hours due to the temporary staff shortage. Friday I felt just drained and was incapable of getting going in the studio until after noon.”
The fun went on. “Now the new water pump isn’t working properly, which means my water supply is uncertain.” She was facing another plumber visit, whenever that would be. In her ideal world, she said, “I would make art between 9:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. five days a week and go for a walk after that. In the real world, it’s 90 degrees by 4:00 P.M. this time of year, the plumbing and lights quit, and every project seems to take longer and be more demanding than I thought it would be.”
I looked at her log, and had a few thoughts about batching errands—key, if you have to drive seventy miles—but I noted something important: She had been in the studio working on art for 16.5 hours during this difficult week. This was more than the twelve hours she had done during the previous week she sent me. She was getting to the studio, and she was increasing her hours there. That should be celebrated. The only problem was her expectation for something different. Her frustration about this—more than individual house woes or doctor trips—was likely hindering her creativity.
So I wrote this: “Another way to think of this is just to be gentle on yourself. You’re coming out of quite a burnout, as you said, and sometimes that requires time and space. If you managed 16.5 hours on art, that’s much better than the zero that often accompanies a creative block.”
She could commit to paying herself first, but she could also repeat this mantra: Make art when you can. Relax when you can’t.
She decided to try this perspective. She kept up with the Monday routine, making sure to preserve that time for art. Then, instead of feeling guilty when she wasn’t in the studio, she scheduled some major self-care: coffee with friends, a Saturday-night dinner.
The effect was liberating. Despite entertaining a plumber for an entire morning—and learning that she’d need to have a new well put in—“it feels like I had a holiday.” That was “because I wasn’t trying to squeeze out art time when there was none to squeeze.” Looking ahead to the next week, she wrote, “I should have at least two of Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday this week for art days. And I’ll try to take them for what they are.” If she could not work, it was fine. If she could, that was great.
This liberation from expectations turned out to be helpful during the next week, which was equally challenging. Her water system almost completely gave out, so she had to take laundry to a friend’s house, take one-minute showers, and water her garden with a can. “So I was glad to make art when I could, and give myself permission not to on days when I was too tired or there was too much going on,” she says. She made it to the studio four days, generally in the morning. “And on all the days art happened, I was very glad of it. It felt great. And I think it felt great partly because I knew I could relax with what was possible on the other days. I would still like more art days but can cut myself some slack when it isn’t possible.”
When she stopped beating herself up about her lack of output, Marchand turned out to be quite productive. She made good use of her time in the studio, working on her oil paintings of flowers. These still-life works explored how light would play on the petals, the glass vases, the water. A few weeks later she wrote me, “Yesterday I finished the first painting I’ve completed since April, and now I’m planning the next one.” It became the next entry in what soon became a botanical series. “I’ll have an image of the finished piece on my website later today,” she said. “I wondered if this day would ever come.”
While I am not living in rural Saskatchewan, I sympathize with Marchand’s original frustration. A recent week’s litany of domestic distractions: We had plumbers out on two different days to diagnose a problem with our sewage ejector system, which is one of those expensive and completely unsexy home-ownership woes that no one ever wants to spend time and money on. Ruth had a school tour scheduled for a half-day kindergarten enrichment program. She also had a follow-up doctor visit after she failed her hearing test at her well-child visit due to an ear infection.
All of this could, of course, be spun toward gratitude. Her hearing is fine! We live near good school programs! I can afford home improvements! Still, as I wound up bringing all four children to Jasper’s karate class on Tuesday afternoon because of scheduling snafus stemming from our minivan needing to be dropped off at a repair shop, I recalled that some authors in their book acknowledgments thank their families for putting up with their absences for months as they wrote. I pictured these writers so secluded in their garrets that they later needed to apologize for all those missed dinners.
Somehow, my life did not seem to be structured that way.
It is tempting to give in to gloom about these things. While I try not to fill time, sometimes time gets filled anyway. I find myself in the midst of a busy week with just one morning completely open and ninety-minute chunks of open time elsewhere. But then a funny thing happens. When I tell myself OK, you only have this time, just do what you can do, I surprise myself. I can write an article draft in a few hours. I can edit it in those ninety-minute chunks. Indeed, when I tell myself to just do what I can, even if it is only a little bit, because it is better than nothing, that something, done repeatedly, adds up.
We all have the same amount of time, so feeling like we have all the time in the world is really about managing expectations. Some suffering—the kind we must learn to be good at—is inevitable. But other suffering is self-imposed. In particular, we suffer when expectations exceed reality. This suffering is a major cause of wasted time. Mental anguish and rumination eat up hours. They also keep us from enjoying the time we have. The internet is full of fake Buddha quotes, but I like this real one from the Dhammapada:
If you are filled with desire
Your sorrows swell
Like the grass after the rain.
But if you subdue desire
Your sorrows shall fall from you
Like drops of water from a lotus flower.
Being able to let go of unrealistic expectations can make us feel more relaxed about time. Here, though, is where the magic happens: I really do believe that, paradoxically, low expectations in the short run, if met consistently, are what lead to great things in the long run. A one-year-old child babbles. A three-year-old can have a full conversation. That two-year gap is bridged not by hours of forced language drills and berating the child for her slow progress, but by daily praise of every new word and linguistic discovery. To paraphrase another wise man’s drops of water reference, little drips hollow the stone. This happens not by force, but by persistence.
Make art when you can. Relax when you can’t. Good enough is good enough. It is not an excuse for laziness. Letting go of expectations is perfectly compatible with working long hours when that is possible, but when it comes to creative achievement, and when it comes to a truly enjoyed life, being gentle—persistently gentle—is just as likely to coax out good outcomes as anything else.
This chapter is about learning to free up time by letting go of problematic expectations. These come in many forms, generally pertaining to decisions, goals, and relationships.
For many people, the first category—decision making—is a major source of angst. Certain personalities are more prone to decision-making angst than others. In the taxonomy of Barry Schwartz, currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Paradox of Choice, people are “maximizers” or “satisficers”:
Maximizers want the absolute best option.
Satisficers have a set of criteria, and go for the first option that clears the bar.
Wanting the best seems like a positive character trait. My children shout such mantras in karate class: “I’m on a quest to be the best!” No one is going to build a career as a motivational speaker by announcing, “I settle! I settle all the time!”
Yet Schwartz’s research finds that satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers because they don’t waste time ruminating over choices and expectations. People who want the best tend to be prone to regret when their choices turn out not to be perfect in some way. “If you’re out to find the best possible job, no matter how good it is, if you have a bad day, you think there’s got to be something better out there,” Schwartz told me when I interviewed him for a Fast Company story in 2016. A bad day can’t be accepted as a bad day. It becomes evidence of some larger narrative of life being on the wrong track.
People who want the best are also prone to measuring themselves against others. “If you’re looking for the best, social comparison is inevitable,” Schwartz told me. “There’s no other way to know what the best is.” Your house can be the best house only if it is better than everyone else’s house. That means you have to look at everyone else’s house, and in a world of 7 billion people, or even among the 468 people you follow on Instagram, someone’s house is bound to be nicer. Envy leads to misery. As novelist and essayist Joseph Epstein once wrote, “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”
Satisficers, on the other hand, know that “the idea of the best is preposterous,” Schwartz told me. “There is no best anything.” Platonic ideals don’t exist in the real world; they exist only in those books you haven’t opened since your ancient-philosophy class in college. In the real world we also deal with the limitations of money, time, and physics. Even if there were a best house, it wouldn’t be in your budget.
Satisficers approach decisions with a list of important criteria, like how close the house is to work, how much redecorating its kitchen needs, and how many bathrooms it has. The criteria don’t have to be noble; if it’s important to you that a house look impressive enough to wow relatives, so it goes.
But then know this: anything that satisfies your important criteria will be fine. Good enough is almost always good enough. While the “best” house no longer makes you happy when someone else’s house is better, a house chosen because it is close to work, has four bedrooms, and sports front yard landscaping that makes you smile when you pull in the driveway will still do all these things regardless of what a friend’s house is like.
If this is true of houses, it’s probably true of romantic choices too, though that is even harder for people to get their heads around. The romantic ideal has no place for settling. Yet if you think about it, unless you are the Platonic ideal of a spouse, you’re really trying to find the best person who is willing to settle for you. Love glows strong in its early stages of newness and uncertainty. After the dust settles, the inevitable fights about money, child raising, and the sewage ejector system might lead a maximizer to believe she married the wrong person. But a satisficer knows that everyone marries the wrong person in the sense that there is no “right” person. Every relationship takes effort. As philosopher (and novelist) Alain de Botton once wrote, “Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.” You survey your options for suffering, go with someone of good character, to whom you are sexually attracted, and then, barring disaster, commit to making it work. That is the real road to happily ever after.
Happiness is a great reason to let good enough be good enough, but for our purposes, it is important to note that satisficing saves incredible quantities of time.
My husband and I are both total satisficers. We scheduled our wedding to take place about six months after we got engaged, which I later learned is considered a swift turnaround. But I was fine with choosing a dress on the first day of looking, and I just picked a florist in town who had good reviews and told him to run with it. Putting off getting married for another year to spend more time deliberating on cake decoration seemed insane.
We’ve continued with this theme in our married life. Here’s how we chose a preschool after we moved to Pennsylvania: Some friends sent their kid to a place close to our new house, and liked it. We figured we would too. This mind-set can also help with making decisions about consumer items. If your sister-in-law has a similar life to yours and is happy with her car, you will probably be happy with that same model. This is exactly how I wound up driving an Acura MDX. You could spend weeks researching a cell phone plan, or you could call a friend who just chose one and go with what she chose. If I am at a business lunch, I’ll either order the chicken Caesar salad (most restaurants seem to have one) or ask the waiter what he likes. That way, I can focus on my companion, not the menu.
Given how much time that satisficing saves, it raises this question: Is it possible for a maximizer to become a satisficer? I mentioned my restaurant habit to a more maximizing acquaintance, whose wide-eyed reaction was telling: What if the waiter is just trying to push a certain dish the kitchen wants to move? My satisficer self found this ridiculous. Even if he was, so what? It is not my last supper. It may not even be my last meal at that restaurant. Next time I’ll order something else. This is not a decision to get worked up about—but to a maximizer, of course, decisions are something to get worked up about.
Schwartz told me he thinks it’s possible, if not easy, to learn satisficing. People exist along a continuum, and no one is a maximizer about everything. Someone who spends months agonizing about the “best” car may be fine with whatever garbage bags are on sale.
So if you have read the past few paragraphs and recognize yourself as a maximizer, know this: You don’t need to learn an entirely new skill. You’re simply transferring an existing skill from one domain to others where it might save you more time. When the maximizing habit kicks in during a medium-stakes situation (for example, you’re choosing a hotel for next month’s long weekend getaway), just pick something that a friend mentioned or a chain that you’ve stayed with before. Then, after you’ve stayed there, ask yourself if you noticed significant downsides. You probably didn’t. Most hotels do a decent job of housing people. Most restaurants do a decent job of feeding people. Most suitcases do a decent job of protecting their contents.
If you find yourself feeling miserable as you compare your choices with other people’s, then don’t put yourself in a place where you see other people’s choices. There are many reasons to get off social media. Becoming happy with “good enough” is as good of one as any.
Some reformed maximizers tell me they respond well to time pressure, or to taking themselves out of the equation. Shelley Young, who works in marketing in the restaurant industry, told me that she had endured various problems in her old house for a long time. “I didn’t want to make a mistake on a big investment that I would have to live with for years,” she said. But when she decided to put the house on the market, she suddenly had to fix those problems. Because she wouldn’t be living there, she was “able to make fast decisions about everything, just going with what was most neutral.” Turns out, her design instincts were pretty good. “It was beautiful, but we only enjoyed it for three months until we moved out.” In her new home, she made sure to get the decisions made quickly so she could actually enjoy her place.
Likewise, if you find yourself dithering over something, a deadline can help. Give yourself five minutes to choose a restaurant. You could even pretend you’re sending a recommendation to a group of people you don’t know all that well. When the alarm goes off, go with the best option you’ve found. Then, reward yourself for your efficiency. If you took five minutes to decide on lunch rather than an hour, you can use the saved time to stay for dessert.
The second domain in which problematic expectations cause time-wasting anguish is goals. I write about productivity; it would be sacrilege to disavow goals. So I won’t. Setting long-term directions can help orient the present and sometimes help people survive unpleasant presents.
But I think the way people set goals is often counterproductive. The temptation is to focus on outcomes: losing fifteen pounds, or reaching $1 million in business revenue. On the way to the outcome, there can be ups and downs, which can be discouraging, even though many of these ups and downs cannot be controlled. So people waste time obsessing about the numbers.
Better to focus on process goals, which are habits by a different name. These are within your control, and when done regularly tend to lead toward the desired outcome over time. Indeed, they often lead toward the outcome in a better way than simply focusing on the outcome (which has a tendency to encourage shortcuts, if you believe the headlines on bank employees fudging numbers to collect their bonuses).
Someone who might normally resolve to lose fifteen pounds, for example, could instead decide to exercise daily, drink water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages, eat vegetables at lunch and dinner, and not snack after 8:30 P.M. Someone trying to grow a business might resolve to pursue five new leads per week, and reach out to former clients once a quarter.
Angst with goals comes from fear of failure. But if you focus on process, then what might be perceived as failure when looking at outcomes isn’t really failure.
As a goal junkie, I have to remind myself of this. I set a goal for the first quarter of 2016—shared publicly on my blog—to make it through an eighteen-minute speed workout I’d clipped from Oxygen magazine. I got close, but I never made it through the entire progressive session of two minutes at 6.0 mph, two minutes at 7.0 mph, two minutes at 8.0 mph, and two minutes at 9.0 mph. I’d gotten to ninety seconds at 9.0 mph and had pretty much fallen off the treadmill.
I was lamenting this as I was interviewing a goal expert when he reminded me that I had pulled that number out of the air. There was nothing magical about the Oxygen workout. What was true was that I was faster on March 31 than I was on January 1. In the course of throwing myself at that speed workout, I’d done many things I didn’t think I could do before. I had run a sub-eight-minute mile. I had done short sprints at 10.0 mph. Thinking of myself as a failure discounted the hard work I’d done. Focusing on the work itself might have been smarter. Any day I’d done my sprints, I’d know I’d made progress. Small steps lead to big things over time.
Indeed, if you want to sustain a habit over time, I’d recommend making the process goals as doable as possible. Make them small to the point where you feel no resistance to meeting them. Set them so you can exceed them with ego-boosting regularity. These little goals are simply “better than nothing.” As a friend noted to me, we could call them BTN goals.
Streaks—those longest lasting of habits—are all about BTN goals. I have long been fascinated by people who do something daily for decades. That’s probably because my father is one of these people. In the summer of 1977, when he was a thirty-one-year-old professor of religion at North Carolina State University, he decided that he should read more Hebrew. He already taught the language and studied ancient biblical texts, so he wanted to build language practice into his life. He began reading Hebrew for thirty minutes per day. He continued to do this for the next four decades. He tells me that there was one day in the 1980s when he read for about ten minutes and then got distracted, and then the day was over. But other than that, the streak is perfect. He read Hebrew on the days my little brother and I were born. He even managed to read on the two days he had eye surgery. He stayed up until midnight the night before to read, and then by the end of the second day after surgery, he was recovered enough to do his reading.
I inherited aspects of my father’s personality, though up until 2017 I had never consciously tried a streak. I say “consciously” because, as I think about it, I am on a multidecade streak of brushing my teeth daily. I am pretty sure I have eaten and slept at some point in any given twenty-four-hour period as far back as I can recall. It is quite possible to avoid doing any of these things for a twenty-four-hour period, but life simply feels better when I do them. People with long-running streaks tend to feel the same way about their habits.
Reading Hebrew wouldn’t do much for me, but I do love to run, and to set running goals, if some are more useful than others. So over the holidays in late 2016, nine months after missing my progressive-speed workout goal, I decided to try something different: I would start a running streak. I would challenge myself to run at least a mile every day. A mile is a BTN distance, nothing much on its own, but I thought I’d see how it went.
The BTN aspect turned out to be effective in getting me to run more. I did not feel like running every day, but it was only a mile. That usually takes me less than ten minutes. Even on my worst, slowest, nose-is-stuffy-and-the-baby-was-up-early days, I could shuffle through twelve minutes of 5.0 mph forward motion. Because I knew I could quit after twelve minutes, I would just go ahead and run it. But in running, the first mile is usually the hardest. By the time I’d run a mile, I felt fine to keep going. I didn’t have to. I simply could if I wanted to. And often I did.
My running streak changed the conversation I had with myself. The question wasn’t if I would run, it was when I would run. This was simply a matter of thinking through the schedule. It turned out that, if the question was when, most circumstances allowed for a short run. After preserving the streak through some early hiccups (for example, a stomach bug; I’d had the foresight to run before I started vomiting one day, and then, as with my father’s surgeries, by the end of the second day, I was OK to do a little something), I realized it was within my power to continue it. So I did. Even if it meant running laps in a hotel room because it was snowing and the hotel gym treadmill was unavailable. Thirty days turned to sixty, then a hundred, then three hundred, and so on.
I don’t want to make too much of this, because I know the streak will end, possibly before this book hits shelves, and certainly before the four decades my father has achieved. I also know myself. I know I am subject to a “tightening” impulse that can make the habit the master, not me, or at least account for some curious quirks. At some point, I started running 1.1 miles—not 1.0 miles—on my BTN days to cover any inadvertent walking that occurred while I was starting up the treadmill.
That said, there is a lesson here. Looking at my running logs, I can see that I have often been running at least a 5K (3.1 miles) daily through the streak. If I’d set that as a goal—run a 5K daily!—I wouldn’t have lasted long. It would be too much for those days when I really could run only a mile. Lowering expectations to the point of no resistance is what makes bigger things possible.
As I study prolific people who seem relaxed and yet get so much done, I see that this is often their secret: small things done repeatedly add up. You do not have to work around the clock. You simply put one metaphorical foot in front of the other, achieve your small goal, then do it again. If you do this often enough, you can fit seemingly impossible things into your life.
Katy Cannon, a UK-based novelist, reports that she has developed this more persistent and abundant perspective on time over the years. At the start of 2013, she had a four-year-old daughter and had just sold her first book. Her contract called for her to turn in another book six months later, which seemed like the sort of work/life disaster one might need to write a very British novel about. But she did it, and in 2016 she wrote and edited five books, a novella, and three short stories (also using the pen name Sophie Pembroke).
This is how she makes such prolificacy work. She takes about two weeks to plan her books, outlining scenes and working with her editors on characters and plots. Then, execution happens in small bursts. She sets a timer, and in a twenty- to thirty-minute block of total focus, she can write an 800- to 1,000-word scene. She does two or three of these blocks a day, generally putting down 2,000 to 3,000 words.
This is not a huge number; I suspect the average office worker cranks out close to 2,000 words in emails daily. But 2,000 is enough, because Cannon just keeps going. Over a four-day workweek of these two or three bursts per day, she produces about 10,000 words. That means she can write a 70,000- to 80,000-word novel draft in seven to eight weeks. Add in the planning time and two weeks for editing, and that’s a full book in eleven to twelve weeks.
Are the books perfect? No, but no book is ever perfect, even ones that take eleven to twelve years to write. As for some idealized book that never made it out of the author’s head, where it would be sullied by reality? We don’t even need to have this conversation. Cannon’s books have the virtue of being completed and out in the world, giving readers pleasure. Done is better than perfect, because there is no perfect without being done.
Some of this speed is practical: “I don’t have time to sit around and wait for the muse, because I’ve got bills to pay!” she says.
But some is also experience, and regular writing generates its own virtuous cycle. The more books she writes, the more book ideas she gets. That means she’s ready to write the next book as soon as the previous one is on its way into production. The more books she writes, the more efficient she becomes. “I see problems before they happen,” she says. “I don’t write as much of the stuff that won’t work later.” The more books she writes, the deeper her stories turn out to be. “Each of my characters does enough to justify her place in the story from the start. Each of my scenes is working harder. They’re doing two or three things.” With persistence, the more things fit right the first time. So she does not need to second-guess herself. She can avoid the mental anguish that keeps people from typing the 800 words necessary to introduce a secondary character to the narrator and foreshadow an argument two other characters will have later. There is time to write the scene, and time later to make it better. Neither need take years. “The sort of time you think is required generally isn’t,” she says. “There’s a point of diminishing returns.”
The last category where letting go of expectations can reduce anguish and free up space is relationships with people. This includes ourselves.
In general, people are a good use of time—a subject we’ll return to in the next chapter—but people have to be taken as they are. People do change, but only because they decide they want to change, not because someone else has spent enough time worrying about it.
Parenting in particular is one long lesson in letting go of expectations. This begins early on, when that nursery that looked so great on Pinterest is rearranged to accommodate the need to strip soiled sheets at 2:00 A.M. The notion that children are inherently peaceful bangs into the discovery that your toddler is the one biting everyone at day care. Family dinner does not happen every night. When it does, it might involve a lot of chicken nuggets. The kids will watch too much TV. They will get bad grades on the occasional test, and if they don’t, that doesn’t mean all is great either. An unchallenged kid might be hopelessly bored and plotting subterfuge. All will not go well. You will spend big bucks to go to Disney World and your child will refuse to leave the hotel pool.
You can spend much time wanting your children to be different. You can make progress on certain things, such as table manners and enforced teeth brushing. But ultimately children are their own people. Detached from any expectation of who they should be, they often turn out to be very cool little people. There is much time saved and, more important, pleasure in acceptance: in getting to know them as they are.
I also believe in getting to know ourselves as we are, and being gentle, as we would with any other friend we’ve known since childhood. It is in this space of letting go of expectations where progress is possible. When I get frustrated with my writing, I like to read the words Ernest Hemingway used to assure himself in A Moveable Feast: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” What writer minds writing one sentence? A paragraph here, a paragraph there. The words that need to come out will come out with gentle persistence. Love, including self-love, is patient, which is really another word for being generous with time.
As for Laureen Marchand, over the next year she embraced this mental shift for herself. “Your idea of ‘make art when you can’ made quite a difference to me,” she says. “It helped me realize that being stressed when I wasn’t able to be in my studio wasn’t making anything better; it was reducing the energy I did have to use during the time available.” But then there was this: “It also helped me see that the feelings art-making engenders are more valuable than anything created by my other commitments.”
When art felt good rather than stressful, she discovered that she really did want to do more art. She wanted to make it her top priority in life.
So she took a leave of absence from her supermarket job. She bequeathed much of her volunteer work to other people. Then she signed on to do an exhibition of her light-flooded botanical paintings in March 2017, and doubled down on her time in the studio. She completed three paintings in 2016, then ramped up her pace to complete five in the first two months of 2017.
This was intense. She reported to her studio almost every day. She finished the last painting at 3:00 P.M. on the Tuesday before her Saturday opening. She delivered it to the gallery on Friday. “Being as they’re oil paintings and take a while to dry, it was too soft even to put a plastic bag around it,” she says. But the show went well, with “excellent attendance” and sales too.
She was proud of all she had done. Putting painting first had been exhilarating, but she was still gentle with herself about the time she had spent not painting. “It surprises me a bit to know that I don’t blame myself for not making that decision earlier,” she says. “If I could have, I would have. And when I could, I did.” There were trade-offs; for one thing, she missed seeing her neighbors through the grocery store job. “But I’ll find some other form of connection that doesn’t cause such fatigue,” she says. “This taste of pure artist life has taken away any taste at all for other people’s schedules.”