Piece work

To sit down and write means I am erasing the present moment, like someone at a concert holding up a smartphone to record the live performance. They kill their own experience. But at the same time, I am capturing a moment, even creating it as I struggle to generate words.

I create meaning and put the words out into the world knowing they are going to destroy someone else’s present. Perhaps my future self will reread the words, and I will kill two present moments. There’s a danger in thinking I must make the words I write more productive than the alternative, but there will always be a theoretically better use of time than writing and reading these words. Clock time teaches us that every minute has productive value.

The real worth of writing is stitching together the fabric of time, to construct a seam that attaches this patch of time to another like a quilt. I am salvaging time one piece at a time.