A day has 24 hours, and this is invariable. Waking hours, more or less two-third of them, are also quantitively fixed. With my bed hours, set at seven hours regularly from 12:00 midnight to 7:00 in the morning, my waking hours are regularly 17 hours, also a fixed length of time. But, experientially, the same 17 hours vary day to day. Some days are short; others are longer. We are, of course, all familiar with this phenomenon. The day is short when we retire at the of the day with the work planned for the day left unfinished. On the contrary, as it is likely with most of us, when we are done with the day’s work long before bedtime, the day is felt longer. When we don’t have much to do through the day, the day is even longer. So, during these weeks of pandemic quarantine, with free time aplenty day to day, I am accomplishing a lot less. I should certainly be writing more; but I am writing less. My journal entires are skimpy, even left blank some days, so aggravatingly on reflection, when they could be and should be fuller. It is a truism, certainly, that we generally accomplish more when we have too much to do and have to work and try to finish under pressure whatever we planned to do. A deadline, given or self-imposed, is an incentive we can not do without. Without a deadline, I spent days to finish this little piece of writing.
06.22.20
