Finding Time to Write

This is a concern of all people writing or wanting to write in this millenium. Life appears to be more hectic than in our grandmothers' days. Back in their day people used to write letters - correspondence - regularly, to friends and family, and often these letters weren't the mere simple greetings of Hallmark cards, but several pages of penned longhand, an art that is quite lost today. And I don't mean just the art of letter writing , but the art of longhand itself is disappearing with the ubiquity of keyboarding, which is essential to survival now. Formerly only young ladies on a secretarial career trajectory learned to type. Now grade schoolers are acquiring this necessary skill.

I used to write long ruminating letters when younger and before long distance telephone calls became more affordable, before the internet revolution and the advent of skype and other communication apps. But I wrote those letters mostly late in the evening, staying up way past a sensible bedtime as there just wasn't enough time in my working day to write anything, not letters and certainly not stories.

Gone are the days that I stay up and write into the early hours of the morning. Mother Time has caught up with me and I no longer have energy late in the evenings, so I find I'm in a daily or rather monthly struggle to fit writing into my life, juggling other responsibilities to my family and my community. My telephone rings constantly, and I answer it, so that I don't have to play telephone tag tracking down my messages. My email box is full everyday and requires some of my precious daily time to answer emails and delete others, to prevent it from becoming a monster of untended mail. The internet provides other methods of communication with the global community that we feel obliged to monitor: FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In - the end is listless as they say, and is a huge time sinkhole.

And despite today's advances in mechanized household appliances that help us shorten the time we spend cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, I still have to expend a great deal of precious time doing those chores. So I find myself longing for those simpler days of my grandmother, when she could get her chores and her work done without constant interruption, even though she did not have a vacuum cleaner, dishwasher or modern washer/dryer combo.

My grandmother's day did seem simpler. While housework was more physically demanding for her and travel much more expensive, still hers was the generation of letter-writing. When Nanny and her young family had an evening stretching ahead, and there was only the radio, or the black and white telly, they curled up and wrote letters or read a book.

It's a crazy blustery fall day today, signalling that winter is not far off on the horizon. I comfort myself with the thought that while I fight to find time to write, at least finding time to read is easier. You can always squeeze in time at the end of a long day to curl up with a good book before bed, just like my grandmother did in her day. Thank goodness some people do find time to write. I will keep fighting to join their ranks, as it is a pleasure I cannot do without.

#personal