pacing

Andy Warhol, Living Room, 1943

Maggie Nelson: I can remember a time when I took Henry James’s advice—“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”—deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would always be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either.

I spent my first three years in San Francisco feeling inadequate and terminally bored, waiting for the best minds of my generation to text me back. Walking around the Mission and the Sunset and eating food that I couldn’t afford as I alternated between elation and despair. Back then, I would’ve done literally anything for the assurance that I would one day be where I am now: safe, productive, loved. But now I miss that time. Its rawness, openness. I said to a friend yesterday that I can’t believe now that I was comfortable with that level of instability. But at the time it was just part of my experience.

For most of my life I wanted things to go faster. Last week, I realized that now I want things to slow down. That change seems meaningful. I don’t know what’s catalyzed it—getting older, probably. Feeling that I’m finally headed in the right direction. Mindfulness? Whatever it is, I’ve noticed that the present seems more bearable.

Back when I was feeling aimless and lost I used to read and reread something Cheryl Strayed wrote about writing:

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Back then, I wanted to believe it, but I wasn’t sure. Now I know that it’s true. Time seems more precious, because I know that every moment matters. Everything adds up.

I’ve written a lot in this blog about how I’ve changed. But in many ways I’ve stayed the same. I’ve always been someone who likes constraints, busyness, seeing people, having things to do. I like expansiveness; I don’t like to slow down. Early in my life I decided that I liked to do things and I should try to do lots of things. That was why being 19 and confused was hard for me: I wanted to fill my time with something meaningful, but I didn’t yet know how.

Now the things I spend my time on feel like they matter. And I keep noticing that I’m running out of time. I’m scared that my need to be occupied makes me unappreciative. I keep thinking: I want to pace myself. I want to savor it a little bit more.

I used to be someone who believed so strongly in my ability to make commitments. That Didion line: I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic, holding always before me the examples of Axel Heyst in Victory and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms and a few dozen others like them, believing as they did that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments, promises made and somehow kept outside the range of normal social experience. I was someone who thought I could make promises and keep them. I don’t believe that anymore. I think the commitment I’ve made that I’m most serious about is to writing. Everything else I don’t know about.

Time passes, and I’m frightened. I have two more weeks with Akko before I get a second dog. One more month of fall in Brooklyn. Two more months in this rented apartment, in this neighborhood I feel ambivalent about. But do I have one more year left in New York, or five or ten? How long am I going to keep writing this Substack for?

I know that I’m living a life I like. There’s a certain terror to that. Because I’m scared I’ll lose it. But I keep thinking: if I appreciate the time I have, I’ll be able to look back and say I paid attention to everything I could.