I’ve been thinking about time a lot the past few weeks. I’m working on my dissertation that focuses in part on Heidegger’s Being and Time and I am currently writing a piece about the value of a cyclical understanding of time. And that has bled into my creative work.

Our relationship with time is a wildly confusing thing to understand. There is a whole load of time-related philosophy with a load of perspectives that a lot of the time, at least to me, sound like the same thing. But when it comes to creating, we sometimes experience time as the currency that we exchange for results.

We spend time on our projects.

We take time to get it right.

We lose time when we get distracted or interrupted.

It’s baked into the language of work.

But what if time stopped being the currency, but the medium through which we create? Maybe we could see time as the thing we create with – rather than the thing we ‘spend’ in creating. In this – I wonder – if we might be able to stop worrying about the cost of the result, and start to more deeply attend to the process. When I fixate on the cost the result isn’t satisfying a lot of the time. But when I focus on the process, something amazing changes.

The creative act is already enough, before the result.

In this mindset and approach to time, the work is done before I’ve finished, and it’s already gratifying before I step back and see what I have made. It stops the dissapointment of a result that’s not what I had imagined.

So I am trying to see time as the medium through which I work, rather than the thing I exchange for results.