There Is All the Time in the World, Just None to Waste
Journal Entry: Saturday, November 8, 2025
There Is All the Time in the World, Just None to Waste
It’s easy to feel like time is running out. The world moves fast. Every moment is an alert, a distraction, a comparison. Artists, especially, feel this pressure - the sense that if we’re not producing, posting, or proving, we’re falling behind. But the truth is both simpler and more liberating: there is all the time in the world, just none to waste.
What this means is not that time is scarce, but that it is sacred. The waste is not in slowness, but in thoughtlessness. To waste time is not to rest, or wander, or stare out the window - it’s to forget what one’s time is for.
Creation takes the shape of the time we give it. Rushed time produces shallow work, anxious time yields brittle work, but attentive time - unhurried, quietly devoted - produces something that remains. The creative life is not about “making the most” of time, but about inhabiting it fully, like a craftsman working unrushed inside his workshop, aware of the dust motes floating through a shaft of light. Keeping a steady rhythm, paying attention to the task at hand.
When I say there is all the time in the world, I mean that the world itself is not in a hurry. Trees do not rush to leaf. Stones take centuries to smooth. Every true work of art lives on that scale. We are part of a larger rhythm, and our task is not to accelerate it but to join it consciously.
‘But none to waste’. That’s the counterpoint. Time is generous but not indulgent. It will meet you halfway, but only if you show up. Every day you postpone what matters most, the soil of your imagination grows a little thinner. Every distraction is a tiny leak in the vessel of your attention. What could have become a poem, a painting, a gesture of love or understanding - drains away.
The art of time is the art of presence. To waste none of it does not mean to be perpetually productive; it means to be awake. Sitting in silence can be a way of honoring time. So can play, or laughter, or a long walk with no destination. The waste lies in forgetting to be there for it.
‘There is all the time in the world’. The difficulty is remembering to live as though that were true, while also keeping the quiet discipline to not let the hours dissolve into nothing.
Every creative life depends on that paradox. You have forever - but only one moment at a time and time is a sharp sword.
So take your time, but take it seriously. Guard your mornings like a monk guards prayer. Let the hours ripen you, not rush you. All the time in the world is already here, waiting for you to begin and it is always the beginning.