Too Much of a Good Thing?

Back in the aughts/'00s and teens/'10s, when I had a research job at Lesley University and later worked at Endicott College, time felt precious, my days busy and productive. After a full day in my Porter Square Office, I'd head over to the local gym in Medford. After a quick workout, I'd pick up something for dinner, head home, and then prepare my writing classes, which I taught once or twice a week.

My "day job" doing educational research had its moments, but after ten or fifteen years of doing the same thing, I looked forward to moving on and letting go of the confines of the 9-5 grind. So, just before turning 60, I left my job, ditched my daily commute, and focused on the work I wanted to do, teaching memoir-writing, telling stories, and writing essays.

Once Covid hit in 2020, I was reduced to teaching online and feeling isolated in my one-bedroom apartment. Suddenly I had way too much time on my hands and no one to spend it with. The next year, in the fall of 2021, I decided to move into a communal house on Beacon Hill—to live with 18 others, most of whom were half my age, or less.

The Beacon Hill Friends House is a Quaker-connected intentional community, where I'd lived for two years in the mid-'90s. Back then, I was in my thirties, going to Northeastern part-time, and living at the House was a great way to meet other young people. Now, in my sixties, I was the oldest man in the community. But community life filled my time and my social calendar —- Quakers are big on committees, and I got involved in house activities, planning social gatherings, doing my weekly chores, interviewing prospective residents, and just hanging out with my younger friends.

But the Friends House is designed for people in transition, with a maximum stay of four years. Many residents leave earlier, and after a turbulent third year in which conflict spread through the House, I decided to leave, too. Now I'm back in my small apartment in Medford, adjusting to living alone again in my late sixties.

I'm living with a conundrum. I have both too little time and too much. Too little: I'm 68, and though my last name literally means "live long" in German, men in my family usually don't. (My father died at 61, his father was 65, and my younger brother was 56). So, I want to make the most of now/today/this week, month, and year. Yet I often feel like I have too much unstructured time. Lately, I've been spending too many hours doom-scrolling on my phone, engrossed and grossed out by the constant drama unfolding in Washington. Every day there's a new grift, a new crisis created by Trump, and a new threat to our teetering democracy.

I veer between scanning progressive pundits on Bluesky for the latest outrages and watching reels of cat videos, contestants on the Voice, or skits from Saturday Night Live. Then I feel guilty for wasting time, squandering a precious resource while knowing that my life/all our lives flow in only one direction.

Sometimes I feel like Mildred Montag, the fireman's wife in Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, who is transfixed by technology and lives her life absorbed in the dramas taking place on her TV screen, disconnected from the real world right in front of her.

I'm not a total couch potato. I've been traveling, doing my one man show at Fringe Festivals in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Elgin, Illinois, teaching a writing class, and meeting with a tutor to re-learn American Sign Language. (I taught deaf children in the '80s and worked as a sign language interpreter in the '90s, but after 25 years away, my signing skills are rusty).

But I think of all I got done in my forties and fifties, balancing my job with part-time teaching, writing a show, and finishing a book. Of course I had more energy back then, but I'm still capable of working out, teaching, and writing.

There's a certain hubris in my advanced practice of procrastination, as if I had all the time in the world, while knowing that I don't. I want to use that time more effectively, to make the most of the days I have left, however long or short they may be.

Judah Leblang is a writer, teacher, and storyteller in Boston. He will be performing his one-man show, "It's Now or Never," at Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood on Saturday November 1 at 1 PM. Register (free) at: https://norwoodlibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/judah-leblang-presents-its-now-or-never/