Free Time



Remember in elementary school when after an in-class exercise was completed the teacher just said, "Now you can have free-time?" Maybe it was just three minutes, but the idea of it felt like a patch of blue sky through a firmament of cloud. During free-time, I could doodle without being told not to. I could lay my head on my folded hands on my desk, I could talk with my best friend quietly in our third row seats.

My daughter mentioned free-time to me yesterday. Having completed a two-hour standardized test in less than one she had two hours of free-time in which to de-standardize. Disallowed markers for drawing, she was permitted a book, which she was happy to have some quiet time read. She also folded her blue sweatshirt on her desk and took a little nap. "It was nice to have some free-time."

I had forgotten about free-time.

I have had unscheduled time. Plenty of it. As a university professor my classroom time is far outweighed by what has become nearly constant prep time as I read, update, prepare course content and, most importantly, keep up with my students' lives and stories. Sitting at my laptop to accomplish all this, I also am checking emails and notifications on social media, often opening several channels of my varied lives at once, and they accumulate on my screen until I am actually doing ten things at once. This makes me feel inspired, on top of everything, and I'll often get two or three ideas for new projects (this blogpost for instance) so that by day's end I have consumed my time with busy-ness even in moments when I might have taken a break.

I am reintroducing the concept of free-time to my vocabulary to prevent this from happening every day.

Free-time means I am not at the computer. I am not even writing (because writing, for me, is work-adjacent).

I am at the piano or in my car on the Blue Ridge Parkway (after dropping my child at school). I am sitting in a chair or the hammock in my garden with a cup of coffee or tea. I can be reading if the book is not a book for a course I am teaching. I am lying on the grass letting my thoughts drift.

Right now I am aiming to have 90 minute segments of free-time in both morning and afternoon. The purpose: to break free of technology's accumulation, to let my brain relax, to bring a little bit of childhood forward into my adulthood, and for no other purposes than these.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC: A POEM MADE OF 90 ABBA SONG TITLES

Image
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC A POEM WITH 90 TITLES OF ABBA SONGS It's because now my life's as good as an ABBA song. --Muriel’s Wedding Because Love is all there is in this SUMMER NIGHT CITY , Because no one is CASSANDRA on THE DAY BEFORE YOU CAME , Because If it wasn't for the nights, we think that we could take it, Because we expect HAPPY HAWAII and get a MUSICIAN with FUNKY FEET ,  Because THAT’S ME , in the car where the ABBA CD blares strobe light satisfaction, rearview mirror turns mirror ball.  Because I enter a WINNER-TAKES-IT-ALL as the low bass line of ABBA subverts my bottom line, Because  my history falls from the shelf because it's WATERLOO , I couldn't escape if I wanted to, Because we DANCE WHILE THE MUSIC GOES ON in the heart's dopamine disco, Because CHIQUITITA , I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Because I turn that music on and I forget  everything. Because I am 8 again, arms out spinning Disco innocence in
Read more

Teaching Creative Nonfiction in Pandemic

Three weeks into my own, two week's into my daughter's isolation, I am teaching a class on Creative Nonfiction. We are nine weeks into the semester. Over Spring Break, everything in the world changed. The students "returned" tonight. I have been teaching in class in Zoom basically since I was told about Zoom. For me, it was the perfect solution to what then were my life's problems. I hated traffic. Zoom. I am deaf and require hearing aids, and listening in rooms of people is impossible. Zoom. I like to teach without interruptions. Zoom. Also, because I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina, often some students can't make it to class. They would Zoom. Some nights, none of us could come to class. We Zoomed. All of us. And that was the end of teaching in a classroom. I still carried the slight stigma of being an "online professor." It held a similar stink that "online dating" used to before everybody did it. It wasn't a "
Read more

Emailing Mother Theresa: On Losing the Art of Gazing

Image
I sent my first email in 1996. My boyfriend at the time had a computer, and the computer had internet. He sent emails all the time. When I was working on a project with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) to develop a salivary ferning microscope that was cost-efficient enough to be distributed to impoverished women in India and Africa, I was asked for my email address. My boyfriend said I could use his.  One afternoon, my colleague at PATH forwarded an email from Mother Theresa. She was giving PATH her approval of the device. Once you get an email from Mother Theresa, there isn't much else to anticipate (Note to the 20000 senders of emails I've received since: you understand). The project got tanked along the way, despite my patchwork re-design that involved a cardboard kaleidescope from a child's birthday party and a 50x magnifying glass. I waited another two years to get my own email address, and another two passed before I started to actually &qu
Read more