endless yellow

Photo by Peter Fazekas on Pexels

have you ever had so little free time 
that when you finally get a sliver of it 
you literally have no idea what to do 
because there isn’t actually enough time 
to do anything particularly meaningful 
like, a Saturday doesn’t contain enough day 
to fit the entirety of the life you want… 
see, I think there’s something that happens 
to a brain on the run, when the body is 
always in motion, when the light is always 
green and it’s go-go-go, and life becomes 
an endless show of constant doing — so when 
that light turns even the slightest shade 
of yellow, you begin to feel uncomfortable, 
unsettled, and you start to think, well, surely 
this yellow light won’t last long, yellow lights 
never last — the time to be slow is always 
exceedingly brief — how can I really put 
the brakes on, really do something that’s free…
because the chill, it’s only going to end shortly, 
and then it’s time for the frenzy once again…
ugh, I want a whole road of yellow lights — 
I want endless yellow! 
I can be myself in yellow 
I can discover myself in yellow 
I can make things up in that 
so-slow-slow-mo-time-doesn’t-even-go-mode 
when people can breathe 
when people can look at squirrels and birds 
and roses, when people can actually pay attention 
to the lyrics on the radio, when they can sit down 
and tell stories, and read books and drink caffeinated 
beverages because they taste good and not because 
you need the chemicals inside — you can make up games 
and watch not just your favorite shows but the ones 
that are shitty too, because even bad art matters — 
where there’s no pressure to make free time count 
because you can always count on free time…
and you’ll never feel the shame of doing nothing 
or be called lazy for not finishing something… 
you’ll never be a deer in the headlights of freedom, 
you’ll never be put off by the idea of leisure, 
you will have it inside you to explore every space, 
every corner of time 
because time won’t be the thing that’s governing you

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Garbage Notes:

I don’t think there’s much that needs to be explained about this poem. It’s transparent, it’s straightforward. It’s about not feeling like you have enough free time to do the things that you want to do, to live the kind of life that makes you feel whole.

It’s so easy now, in this always go-go-go world, to feel like we’re being stretched too thin. It’s like in The Lord of the Rings when Bilbo tells Gandalf he feels “thin … stretched … like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”

But everyone seems to want more bread, right? Life is like a non-stop pursuit of fucking bread, and there’s not enough substance in our souls to go around.

I don’t know what the solution is. Sometimes I think it’s best to keep things simple. Take on as little as possible. But when there’s so much external pressure to do everything and to be a certain way, it gets harder and harder to turn down commitments.

You have to work, you have to find love, you have to be social, you have to have tons of friends, you have to make lots of money, you have to have multiple side hustles so you can have diverse streams of income in case everything goes belly up, you have to be cultured, you have to read, you have to spend time with your family, you have to keep up on all the latest entertainment and technology, you have to dress right and have style, and you have to look young and take care of yourself.

Ugh! It’s too much. Makes you just want to let go, slow down, and settle into that permanent yellow. But that’s dangerous too, right? You can’s slow down or stop for too long, because everything you’ve built so far will fall apart…

And when you do get free time, there are just so many choices of what you can possibly do with it that you end up pissing it all away thinking about what you should be doing instead of actually enjoying it—that, or you’re lamenting the loss of all the potentially better things you could have been doing instead.

I don’t have an answer to this dilemma. I don’t have a cure. This is a real thing, a real problem that a lot of people deal with. I’ve felt it worse as I’ve gotten older, but it could just be that the world has gotten more distracting.

There are many things pulling us in too many different directions. Just answering emails didn’t used to take this much time. Meetings were only for important things. Movies and video games didn’t take as long. Books weren’t so complicated and didn’t have a million sequels.

Everything is like five layers deep now, and yet still, somehow, it’s all ten times as superficial. Don’t ask me how. That’s just how it feels.

Phew. Okay, that was a lot.

I’m going to end this by saying what I think is my favorite line of the poem, which is the part that says, ‘even bad art matters.’ If there’s one thing I want more time for, it’s to make more bad art and to consume more bad art.

I don’t want to feel like everything I sit down to start has to be a masterpiece. And I don’t want to feel like everything I decide to consume has to be one either, otherwise it was a waste of time. I want to just swim in bad art, and not have to explain myself.

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There were some great reader comments over on Medium when I first posted this poem—feel free to check out the conversation at no cost right HERE.

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