No Time To Spare

       Well, we've had a touch of rain overnight, looks like!  The plants will be happy--those that are left after the freeze anyway.

       I'm reading a book of essays "Thinking about what matters" by Ursula Le Guin, the prolific writer in several genres.  The actual title is No Time To Spare--a title that grabs us all.

       An almost-ninety-year-old writer, she writes about age, time, writing, and cats in these short punchy essays.  Pam delivered the book to me on Thursday and I plan to finish it today, but it's one that will keep unspooling in my mind after I've finished.

       Okay, so aging: Many of my friends, like me, will soon or have recently turned 70--give or take a half-decade or so.  A few are older, a few mere babes of fifty-something, but all of us are aware of time: what we do with the time we get, what we've already done, and what we might as well put in the "not likely to get done" bucket.

       Ursula Le Guin faces aging head on, and she objects to the chirpy reassurances of younger people, "You're not old!" We can know, from experience, what it feels like to be thirty and forty, but they cannot know what old feels like.  I remember not knowing, back when we seemed to have forever ahead.

       Old is not entirely chronological--some people are vital into their nineties, some are old at sixty.  But still--let's face it, she says--we're old in a culture that values youth.  We don't have all the time in the world and it's imperative that we choose the life we want for as long as we're here living it, doing what we choose to do with what Mary Oliver calls our "one wild and precious life."

       In her title essay, "No Time to Spare," Ursula Le Guin writes, in a nearly ten-year-old essay (after being queried by Harvard: "What do you do with your spare time?"):

     "An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome.  But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied.  I am free, but my time is not.  My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing  prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen...with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes...with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Crazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep.  None of this is spare time.  I can't spare it.  What is Harvard thinking of?  I am going to be eighty-one next week.  I have no time to spare."