The Machine

Lately I have found myself returning over and over again to a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”:  “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” Some days, especially those days when I work at the office (three out of five days/week), I feel lucky if I can live “outside the machine” for even those thirty minutes.  To me, living outside the machine means freedom from those demands—quotidian and episodic alike—which take me away from my creative self.  And I throw a huge net around the term “creative,” to include reading for the sole purpose of personal edification as well as the more affirmative activities of creative writing and engaging in my fiber art.  I seem to have it inverted:  in the 21^st century, for me at least, the machine is the demanding mistress, where formerly art and creativity occupied that historically archetypal role. 

Here’s the breakdown of a typical day when I work from the office (rounded to the nearest quarter hour):  daily ablutions 2x day (45 minutes); commuting (45 minutes); work (8 hours); personal email (1 hour); exercise (45 minutes); meal preparation and eating (1.5 hours); domestic responsibilities (2.0 hours); sleep (8 hours).  Totaling 22.75 hours, that leaves only a shocking 1.25 hours left in the day, time I sadly confess to spending, more often than not, exhausted in front of the television.  While I do include about 30 minutes of reading in the above-noted 8 hour chunk of sleep time, I am usually semi-comatose by then, so that this reading period only infrequently qualifies as “personally edifying.” Further, I do not count time spent on a more rote fiber art project in front of the television the same as time spent working, in a focused manner, on a more challenging, non-derivative piece.  As I actually commit this insane schedule to paper, I am horrified that it has come to this.  No wonder I feel so depleted so much of the time.  Add to this the fact that I am a part-time graduate student (Masters, Folklore), and there would seem to be an overall negative balance of time in my day. 

So the question, then, is whether it is possible to carve out more time outside the machine?  And, if not, then how does one maximize that seemingly meager 30 minutes?  Then again, given the schedule I just delineated, even 30 minutes looks like a glorious luxury.  Does this seem absurdly skewed, as a template for living, or is it just me?