you will never have the time
A few summers ago, when I was working for an opera company, I noticed one morning how each of the singers seemed to switch immediately into "rehearsal mode" upon arrival at the theater. I admired them for it. I was jealous, in fact, that they had a place where they could come to flip that switch and focus completely on art work for a few hours. I remembered that moment quite vividly recently because I found myself wishing again for that place and time of day.
Working artists know, however, that there is no such thing. There may be a studio; there may be well-intentioned plans and schedules, but there is no such thing as a place for art-making, not because it's simply impossible to fit into a busy life, but because it's impossible to ever do anything else.
“Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation.”
There will always be a new project to embark upon. Whether that is distracting or exciting depends on your options and your ability to say no the bores, but the reality is that your life will always be full. In a grand sense, it's full of jobs and families and any number of things that derail us; day to day, we are always finding inspiration on the streets, redesigning bad logos in our heads, and learning poems on our commute. It's not that we overload ourselves (though we can overload ourselves); it's that creative work is a 24-hour-a-day job. That's why Yayoi Kusama keeps hiring more staff at 85 years old, and why Ken Burns is always working on five or six projects at once.
And that's why we stopped segmenting our time once we left school -- because we learned that there is no 90-minute block when you think about history and nothing else. If you divide your life into class periods, you will never have the time to take them all.
Similarly, you will never "have the time" for everything you want to do. That is just a fact of living. New opportunities don't arise suddenly when you've found an extra 20 hours each week to pursue them.
I have learned and re-learned this lesson many times over, and it doesn't discourage me anymore. I don't mind taking on projects when I can't figure out how I'll finish them. The reality is that if something is important to you, you'll do it. You'll find a way how. If it's not important, it falls away. Trial and error (failure) may be one of the more difficult methods of learning your values, but it's reliable.
Said another way: Don't have dreams. Have things you do.
