Essay: On Having Too Much Time

Most people are starved of time. Like many older people, I am weighed down with it.

It is an axiom of modern life that no-one has enough time. People are struggling to cope with work demands, family demands , financial difficulties, practical worries and much else.

Everyone, it is assumed, is perpetually busy, with timetables stuffed with schedules and commitments that they can barely fulfil. Perhaps this is true for those in youth and middle age. But it is different for old people.

Many old people have a much worse problem that time starvation. That is, they have time on their hands, and it weighs heavily.

I am one such person. But unusually, I have been pretty much in this dilemma all my life, mainly because I decided to be a writer ( combined with the fact that I was fortunate enough to have sufficient money/success to support such an ambition).

Writers spend a lot of time doing nothing - or apparently nothing, because keeping an open space if their minds is part of the job. It’s as if they are waiting to receive something, which they are - an idea, a phrase, a plot twist. But the end result is the same - that writers don’t get onto the merry-go-round of constant activity that most people spend their lives submerged in. Even when I had children in the house, I spent a large part of the day sitting at a desk, listening, as it were, to the tick of the clock.

Now I am 69 years old, and the clock has become a lot louder, and the time weighs a lot heavier. I have no children living with me any more. Like many people past retirement age, I am finding that I have nothing much to do. And I don’t like it.