Back to Class

On Monday (two short days) I’m going to do something that I haven’t done in 17 years. (When I put it that way, and when I realize that’s almost half my life, I’m suddenly sad.) OK, so what’s the thing, you might ask? Well, to put it unexcitingly and finally just spill it, I’m going to go to a place of learning and take a class in something that’s not related to my work. In fact, it’s a class on a topic totally unrelated to my vocation. It’s a class just because I want to learn something that will probably never actually be profitable to me economically in any way. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the way in which people have reacted so far when I tell them this.

Universally, the first thing people say when I tell them I’m headed back to class is to express their envy that I actually have time to do this at all. Since I started getting this feedback, the realization has crept into my conscious just how much time I do have to myself to do… whatever… and to utilize this time at least a bit more productively. Even before people expressed this envy I had a lot of productivity guilt. I’d regularly look back on a day and say, “I had 6 hours of time that I wasn’t engaged in work or sleeping. What did I get out of it exactly?” I have a lot of difficulty “relaxing” or whatever it is the average person likes to do with their free time. Now that other people have expressed to me the perceived value of my underutilized hours, I find myself guarding it much more jealously and in many ways I put it to better use. My previous retrospective guilt over the waste of this precious commodity has become proactive and now I feel much more satisfied with the use of it. The unintended impacts of people’s random comments is endlessly fascinating.

Now all this does bring up a couple of related concepts. Firstly, I’ve written several times that the average person actually has much more free time than they want to admit and that they choose intentionally to put themselves in situations in which they lose this commodity. For example, if you have a yard that rivals the size of some golf courses, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have to spend a lot of time mowing it. Those with twelve kids need not be shocked that they spend much of their time shuttling people to ballet class. I can’t help but point out, however, that the majority of topics which consume our free time are mentally passive ones. In today’s media-saturated world, that’s no excuse. You can easily find a podcast about medieval French ballet to listen to on the mower. Those twelve kids might enjoy learning Russian with you in the car on the way to their activity. It can be done, and, I would argue, it should be done. It sets a good example for those around you and, I’d further insist, an intellectually growing parent is a good parent. I see far too often parents who forget to take care of themselves both physically and intellectually in the name of raising their children. This does them a great disservice and denies their children a fulfilled and happy and growing parent in their lives. That, however, is a topic better left explored in another post.

The second subtopic is to wonder exactly what actually constitutes a “productive” activity. Is productivity anything that’s not just sitting and watching television? If I come home, cook dinner, exercise, finish the book I was reading, write a review of it, edit a batch of pictures, upload them and put together a narrative blog post for them all before 11pm, is that *REALLY* productive or is it just busy? What’s the standard here? Does a productive activity have to be financially profitable or does fiscally neutral suffice? Does it have to be intellectually broadening and if so, what exactly does that even mean? I could probably learn something from watching a reality show in MTV. Does THAT count as productive if I now know more about waterproof mascara than I did before? Clearly this is all a personal judgment but it’s still one that I struggle with. Somewhat scarily, my opinion on this topic does seem to change from one day to the next. I sincerely wonder how I will look back on myself a decade from now and judge my use of time.

At any rate, photography class starts Monday. I will not fail to document the process. It will be interesting to see if this is the first of many or simply the first.