As I type this, a grandfather clock marks the minutes. Not many homes have them these days, at least not the narrow, space-constrained London terraces I tend to visit. This timepiece belongs to my parents in America and is at least six feet tall - apparently they were called ‘longcase clocks’ before Henry Clay Work’s 1876 smash hit My Grandfather’s Clock forever changed their name. (Johnny Cash had a version too.) A closer inspection today reveals that it is special, like many of the objects in my parents’ house that I grew up alongside but didn’t sufficiently appreciate at the time. The face is rendered in silver-and-gold end-of-century numbers and curving etched designs.
It’s 6 a.m., I am jet lagged from a long journey, and the only noises in the house are this clock and the tapping of my keyboard. One sound is more regular than the other. I didn’t manage to do a Substack last week. In fact, I’ve barely written a thing since I turned in my manuscript a while ago. It feels shameful to say that on this particular morning, when the swinging pendulum of the grandfather clock serves as the distilled sound of existential guilt. Existential guilt, for those who don’t know the term but are surely familiar with the gut-wrenching sensation, is the feeling that you could and should be doing more with what you’ve got, with what you’ve been given, with your unique potential. It’s the sense that you’ve let someone down terribly, and that this someone is you.
Six a.m. is early in the day. But I can’t shake the nagging feeling that it’s later than I think.
My grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf
So it stood ninety years on the floor
It was taller by half than the old man himself
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.
It was bought on the morn of the day he was born
And was always his pleasure and pride
But it stopped, short, never to go again
When the old man died.
Ninety years without slumbering,
Tick, tock, tick, tock,
Its life seconds numbering,
Tick, tock, tick, tock,
It stopped, short, never to go again
When the old man died.
‘Life seconds numbering’?
Bloody hell. Existential guilt and its kissing cousin, death anxiety, are literally baked into the lyrics of the song that gave the clock its name.
I’ve never been skilled at idleness, which in the context of modern-day productivity culture sounds like a humblebrag, but I don’t think it is. The contemporary forces underpinning rampant social comparison could be a factor here too, but I don’t think it’s that either. Relatively few external pressures or markers make me write. My primary drivers are internal, but the differential diagnosis between being driven by fear and pulled by value is hard, even for a trained psychologist. Anyway, for everything we do, everything that matters, everything we pursue, perhaps there’s always a kernel of fear at the heart of it.
The most fearful and painful social comparisons I make are not between my own writing and the books that make it onto the New York Times bestseller lists. When I weigh up my own life against the lives I occasionally peer at through the windows of Instagram, I’m not particularly troubled. No, the most tormenting comparisons I make are between myself and the self I could have been if I’d only kept to the path, stayed the course, avoided distractions.
I feel most accountable to my own past and future. If I have let the former down, perhaps there’s still hope for the latter. I whisper it to myself when I feel I can’t go on any longer, when it seems the current project will never finish, when I can barely imagine starting the next thing.
Your future self will thank you.
People kindly ask after the book, and I tell them my editor wrote me a pre-holiday email and used words like engaging, fascinating, smart, thought-provoking. She has told me she’ll give me full feedback after the holidays. Then people say how nice it will be for me to relax over Christmas and New Year, how lovely it will be to have nothing to do.
Nothing to do. How can I wrap my head around that? When I am overwhelmed, I seek out distractions that only serve to overwhelm me in more complex and varied ways. Wrangling with an imminent book deadline, I coped by acquiring kittens of a particularly needy and demanding breed, applying to host Ukrainian refugees in our home, and planning and carrying out major home refurbishments. Knowing I would have to leave for the airport at 5 am this past Monday, I decided to host a bring-your-own-performance late-night dinner event on Saturday night, the festivities fuelled by wine and a groaning table of homemade food, and illuminated by last-minute eBay-sourced antique candelabras, a party that left me hung over and ratty the day before our departure.
But then again - the kittens are now the darlings of the household. Hosting our Ukrainian friends was wonderful, and I hope I will know them all my life. The bring-your-own performance party left me gobsmacked and grateful and moved at the astonishing talents of my friends, who recited Auden, played banjos and guitars, pianos and kazoos, sang Rufus Wainwright and Bing Crosby numbers, delivered original poetry, performed The Girl from Ipanema in Portuguese. I wouldn’t take any of it back for anything in the world.
So now here is my novel, the first draft of which was finished in 2020. It’s nipping at my heels, whining, demanding editing. By nearly any measure, to dive into it now is insane. My nonfiction manuscript is still in train. I have had a difficult year full of surgery, rehab, lack of paying work, parenting a nearly-teenager. I know I deserve a break, that I should allow myself to enjoy this season of gifts and merry fallowness. But then I whisper it to myself, without even meaning to.
Your future self will thank you.
When a farmer lets a field lie fallow, hoping to restore its fertility for a future round of crops, she can hardly afford to sit around waiting. Instead, she must move on to a different field, a different crop. Am I really a workaholic, a fear-driven walking (and typing) pathology? Or am I merely a humble word farmer, doing the practical and necessary thing, laying down the crops that one day will feed me, in more ways than one, in the winter of my life?
You tell me.
Great post. I can relate to the feeling of existential guilt. It took me two weeks of my self imposed book sabbatical to stop beating myself up. Finally having fun, playing.
I hope you manage to enjoy the holidays and take some time just to be xx