All The Pretty Flowers, All The Good Books, Never Enough Time

On the disconnect between wanting and doing.

My brain on flowers.

“No time, no time.” That was Uncle David’s mantra that year he came up from Buenos Aires. I sat with him at my mother-in-law’s breakfast table many mornings, looking out the picture window over Long Island Sound, the sun bouncing across the water to blind us from the coming day.

I remember David’s hands waving over a plate of half-eaten toast and marmalade, his head shaking side to side, his English-speaking voice corrugated by Parkinson’s yet loosened by the melodic Argentine Spanish he spoke at home – a voice burdened by something I never heard in my father-in-law Algy’s cheery RAF English.

David, unlike the rest of Algy’s eight Anglo-Argentine siblings, was a mystery to me. All I knew of him were the stories – the stories about how he had disappeared in Argentina. Disappeared as in: Walked out of the home he shared with his wife and children one day and reappeared another day about three years later. No explanation. His clothes were pressed.

Now here he was in the States for a month’s-long visit, clearly agitated that there was not enough time to do all that he wanted to do. I don’t remember what that “all” was. But I remember clearly that he wasn’t just referring to this particular visit.

It seemed he thought there was never enough time in general, in this life.

After David went home, his words stuck around. Whenever things got pressing, my (then) husband and I would look at each other, shake our heads, and say “No time, no time.”  

A few years later, back in Argentina, David killed himself.

He ran out of time I guess.

It has always bothered me.

In part because his mantra is my mantra.

To be clear, I’m not planning or hoping to make an exit any time soon. But I am completely baffled about why I continue to take on more things than I can possibly do and then stress out when I realize there are not enough hours in a day, a week, a year, or even a lifetime to do all the things I want to do while also doing the things I need to do to make a living.

My friends, my family – everyone is sick of hearing me say, “I’m too busy.”  

There is a disconnect between who I am and who I think I am or can be.

Exhibit A: There are 28 books on my bedside table. It is a very small table, though it does have a bottom shelf (and a drawer) for extra books. Honestly, I am not making this up, and I did not stack the books up just to photograph them. This is what I woke up to. My husband has started calling the top stack the leaning tower of Pisa. I mean, WTF, when do I think I’m going to read all these books?

There are books next to my comfy chair in the living room. Books spilling off the coffee table. Books that just arrived in the mail. Books crammed into every corner and on every shelf and surface of my office. (And you know about the sobriety shelf(ves).) Many read, of course, but many not.

But the stacks of books are just one manifestation of what goes on in my brain. Look at the bulletin boards collaged with quotes and magazine tearsheets and pretty postcards and kitchen designs and black and white photos and Fair ribbons and scraps of fabric and paint chips. And the little bowls filled with dried flowers and shells and coins and clips and buttons. I will never be a minimalist. Ever. No matter how many design magazines I read.

And that flower collage I made last year when I was starting the Floret online course, thinking I was going to somehow transition back to market gardening and freelance writing while still doing my full-time job.

While still doing my full-time job. Um, hello?

So here’s an example of how all this plays out in real time: We return from Delaware January 1, and I work ‘round the clock, literally, for now going on 14 days. Partly this is due to a weird confluence of deadlines, with a magazine feature to write on top of my regular magazine food column, while producing the two weekly newsletters, moving The Vine (a newspaper supplement I edit) towards the printer, kicking off production for the annual 100-page Island Guide, and developing and photographing recipes.

It's hard to get a rhythm going with these deadlines because two are 52 times a year, one is seven times a year, one is eight times a year, one is once a year, another is four times a year, and another is unknown. I have a calendar of all the dates, but somehow I never adequately anticipate the times when they collide with each other.

The magazine feature I just wrote was about growing cut flowers. Naturally, I have so much to say on this subject that I wrote 4500 words instead of 2500. Ugh. Then I had to burrow through my photos, which are not well organized or edited down, to give a selection to the magazine art director. That poor man now has hundreds of photos to go through instead of say, 50 or 60, because I could only narrow down so much, because…no time, no time!

Meanwhile, at 1:30 in the morning, I am reading seed catalogues and putting little sticky notes on everything I want to order. Look at those stickies! In what world would I ever have time to plant and tend to that many things if I ordered everything I wanted on those pages? Of course, I won’t order everything, but I will still order too much. Crazy.

And that despite this: a decision.

A decision, made mutually by my husband and me on a twilight walk a few weeks back, in an attempt to reduce my anxiety. The market garden – as a business, as a potential segue for me back to farming and writing for a living — is not going to happen. We will keep working towards slowly building the big garden for our own enjoyment and perhaps eventually for me to sell some things from time to time.  

But by the time I am financially able to get out of my day job and make income simply from gardening and writing, I am not going to want to put in the enormous time and effort it will take to get a decent return on a small farm business. (And trying to kickstart this process while still working full-time is just Loony Tunes.) I am better off freelance writing (and that is saying something!) than I am gardening as a business at this point.

My husband will be 77 when I am 65, and I’d much rather spend more time hanging out with him than burying myself in the strategy, marketing, and implementation of making a small farm business work. I’ll still get to garden, but with much less pressure.

Yet even with this decision, which seems like a foregone conclusion, I’m still currently on a treadmill. I’ve been doing this since I was a senior in high school, when I was, ironically, editor of my high school yearbook. (I started early on this path.) I got so stressed out that I nearly had a nervous breakdown.

Lately I’ve been wondering a) when this will stop and b) why it is the way it is. I told my husband the other night that I must have a mental disorder, and I went on to Dr. Google and asked what it might be. Dr. Google did not have an answer for me; there does not appear to be any official disorder that matches up exactly with my symptoms, though I may still check in with a professional on this! I do wonder if it is an addictive behavior that works for me in some ways (less socializing) and hinders me in other ways (less socializing!). And I’m sure there is plenty of fear, pride, and ego in the mix.

But all that could only be the half of it. I’m stubborn. Even if I never had to work another day in my life for money, I would be torn – and yes anxious – over finding time to learn to knit or learn to paint or to become a better photographer or a better flower arranger. Or to find time to write my memoir, time to record Dad talking about the history of our family while walking around St. Peter’s graveyard. Time to go antiquing with my sister, or time to get that hour of walking in with my husband every day. What about the time to do that trip to Scotland? The time to find a warm place to go in the winter?

And time to read all those books!

My husband informs me that by his observation, this is just my personality.

“It’s who you are,” he says.

“What should I do?” I ask him.

And this from someone, I must point out, who has brought this subject up once or twice: “How about nothing? You could just skip sleeping altogether,” he says.

Ha, ha, very funny. But he does have a point. I don’t really want to walk into the sunset or off a chair like David did. But I also can’t walk around all the time thinking my head is going to explode. So I’m going to have to learn to live with myself and the brain and body that constantly tells me there’s something else I should be doing.

To be continued.

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