No time to spare
I read. At least three books a month. I think that’s a lot, because when I’m reading, I’m not writing. And I know others read more, so my three books a month don’t make me necessarily well read. Ursula K. Le Guin died yesterday. (Not really, but read on.)
Now, just so you know, until this past week, I didn’t know who that was. I picked up her book from the Johnsonville library as an afterthought because I liked its title. “No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters,” was published in December 2017. In this case it was what mattered to the 88-year-old.
Granted, she was probably a few years younger when writing this volume, as it takes a year or two to get a book published. And now’s she gone. And her words are now left for the rest of us. And that is probably why I write. To leave a little something behind. A little something that says, “She was here,” like Kilroy and WWII. (If you don’t know Kilroy, look him up. He’s still out there. For now.)
The essays in Le Guin’s book date to 2010, and end in august 2013 … Told you. Books take time. Perhaps they begin percolating when the first cells start dividing at a writer’s conception. It’s possible. They say there are codes in our DNA. Maybe there are books there, too. Ursula ends this book with “Notes from a week at a ranch in the Oregon high desert.” Again, I find this intriguing, as I did not know Oregon had a high desert and I have to go research high deserts and what creates them.
The piece ends on the fifth afternoon of that visit. A 73-or-so word sentence and a question: "What is entity?"
Before we answer the question that she asked, look up Ursula for yourself. She was writing when I was born. Her life was writing. Get to know her, or maybe you already do. I am now seeing her words in lots of places. I am reading more of her words as well. The dictionary says entity is “a thing with distinct and independent existence.” And its synonyms are body, object, thing … The list goes on a little further. Entity, the dictionary continues, is “Existence. Being.”
I have at least six somewhat-written books in front of me going into various stages of being. In the meantime, I have no time to spare.
I am getting busy making sure I give my time to what matters and what will last, so that when I am 88 years old there is still another book to be added as an entity of its own.
Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea.”
Read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.”
Read anything. Anyone. And re-read. Take the time to be well-read. And in learning more from others, bring into existence those things within that need to come to life.
“No Time to Spare” is taken from the expression that we believe we have “spare time.” I'm sure you know. We do not. There is no time to spare, regardless of our ages. We only have our entity, our essence of being. Here and now.
Take the time to contemplate the words of others. And then move along. Write a few of your own.
Just so you know, this essay was started in 2018, as Ursula left this world for what comes after it on January 22, 2018, a day after I read her book. I rediscovered this essay just this past January, tweaked it and will likely include it in the next collection of my thoughts, REFINING ...
Let me get back to writing. And reading. I have no time to spare.
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