Take your time

I’ve been thinking about time lately. It’s measurable in a scientific sense, but it expands and condenses as we experience it. Recently, I have found a way to help myself to claim some time back from tech temptations in order to clear my thoughts. 

As a child, six weeks of summer holidays seemed an endless stretch, until the last week raced past, barely giving me time to blink. When my daughter was a baby, people would say to me, “Enjoy it, it’ll go past so quickly!” which seemed strange as I wrestled sleeplessly with caring for this tiny creature. It seems much truer now, with the benefit of hindsight and not a little nostalgia! 

Lover's Eye (unfinished), pastel on paper, 2026

In September, we lost our pony Tom Tom. He was very old, so it wasn’t unexpected, except the shock of death always comes with a jolt. We’d had him for eighteen years, which is a long time, but it still wasn’t enough. I have written before about grief, yet the pain of losing a beloved pet is an intense one. Like other losses, it strips layers from around your heart and leaves a soreness so intense it can be hard to breathe.

 

When it comes to managing our everyday time, almost everyone I know is trying to find a work/life balance in some way. My challenge is managing my day-job (which I enjoy and gives me a sense of purpose) with making art. I keep Fridays free as a ‘studio day’ because I otherwise find it hard to fit in creative time amongst all the other demands. I believe that I want to spend all of my time drawing, making and writing, but some days when I have that time, actually doing the work proves difficult. There’s also a lot of admin involved in seeking out and applying to opportunities, sending information to curators, preparing work for exhibitions and so on. 

 

It all takes up a lot of time and bandwidth, which brings me to a modern demon: how do we stay in touch with things while not succumbing to the lure of social media? As my day-job involves marketing, I have to use social media so that I know what’s happening with it, but I also find myself being drawn into it when my time would be better spent elsewhere. Do I really need the latest drama of ‘Threads lore’ or another Instagram video of a 1980s dance routine? I think we all know the answer to this, yet I am easily pulled back to the siren song of my iPhone.

 

I was reading an article online last week about how damaging screen time is for young people, when I realised that I could use the settings on my phone to limit my own social media use. Sometimes the obvious needs to be pointed out! I already had a night-time ‘Do not disturb’ setting on, and to this I added an app limit for social media. On Day 1, I reached the hour-limit quickly and put my phone down. On Day 2, I was already thinking, “I won’t check in on Facebook now because I’ll run out of time later.” It’s not infallible, because I can extend the time limit if I want to, but it has broken the spell on me to a large extent. For me, social media is a good way to stay in touch, and I’ve conversed with some brilliant people online, but it is also a time-waster, catching me in its doom-scrolling vortex more often than not.

 

Cutting back has given me more time to think. I usually read a lot anyway, but using the extra time to read more has made my head less cluttered and my concentration has already improved. I have been more creative too, and importantly it has been easier to get on with making something when I am not drawn to someone’s online opinions or the latest bad news from around the world. I realise how much easier it is to procrastinate when there is a constant parade of entertainment at my fingertips. 

 

Time has expanded and become more tangible again, a thing that can stretch out through minutes and hours. I remind myself that being alone with thoughts and feelings is okay, even when the feelings are sad. Something will come of it, if I just take my time. 

In memory of Tom Tom, (photo from 2020)

Lover's Eyes

About the Lover's Eye drawing at the top of the post: as part of looking into memory, I've done some research for artworks in the past few years about the Momento Mori in art and one of the things I came across was a Georgian fashion for miniature paintings that people would carry with them to remember a loved one, lover or child. As I often employ an eye motif in drawings, this appealed to me, and so I decided to create an eye miniature myself. If you'd like to read more, there's an article about Lover's Eyes here.