Where Does All the Time Go?
Isn’t it strange how time flies? I don’t understand where it all goes, especially now, when it seems like we should have more time to work on the things that we need to. But here I am, trying to figure out how it’s been more than a week since I wrote my last blog post. It’s not like I haven’t thought about writing, I think about it several times a day. But then I get distracted, and the thought and moment pass, yet another casualty of weeks that all seem to blur together in a repetitive cycle of daily rituals and a perpetual juggling act of competing responsibilities and priorities.
Here in our house, every day in quarantine seems to follow the same basic routine. We wake up around 6:30 a.m. and go downstairs to make coffee. Teresa and I will sit and talk for a little while before she eventually starts playing around on her phone and I fire up my laptop to begin looking at work stuff. An hour or so later the kids start to wake up, and over improvised breakfasts of Pop Tarts and bowls of cereal, we huddle long enough to talk about what the boys need to do for school that day. Then all of us get to work on completing our respective tasks, client projects or homework assignments, jumping on conference calls or logging onto Google classroom, seamlessly switching back-and-forth between apps and devices as we squeeze in other chores like walking the dog or folding the laundry. Then at about 6 p.m. we stop to watch the news and eat dinner, before deciding on something fun that we can all do together. We try to reserve the evenings for family time, but this is not a hard-fast rule, since none of us are ever really away from our screens, so there’s always going to be occasional distractions from work or school, some important project or pressing deadline that takes precedent over everything else.
Right or wrong, during quarantine, things like bedtimes, commonly observed meal times, and set work hours are more of a suggestion than something that is etched in stone. With two growing boys in the house, it’s not unusual for my kids to ask for “second dinner” at 10 p.m., when we should be getting ready to go to bed to start the whole process over again. It’s also not uncommon for me to wake up in the middle of the night and make my way down to my makeshift work station at the kitchen table to hypnotically resume my work in the quiet and dark of the pre-dawn hours over a microwaved cup of coffee.
I read somewhere that because more people are having to work from home as a result of the current COVID-19 health crisis, that on average, people are working three more hours a day than what they would normally work. Of course, this is not surprising, since we’re constantly connected at all hours of the day. Whether it’s throwing on the token collared shirt for the morning staff meeting over Zoom, finishing up a proposal on your laptop while sitting on the couch with the family as they watch TV, or instinctively checking email when your phone buzzes on the nightstand next to your bed in the middle of the night, technology is both a gift and a curse, our loyal servant and a cruel master. Our increasingly interconnected world has in turn warped our perception about time, how we spend our time, and ultimately how we have to pick and choose what parts of our lives we deem more important than others.
Running Against the Wind
Bob Seger said it best when he made the sobering observation about growing older, that moment of self-awareness when we all have to make peace with the unrelenting passage of time: “Well those drifters days are past me now. I’ve got so much more to think about…deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out”.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. I think it’s crazy, that as humans, we don’t really remember any of our first five years of life. Then we spend the next ten or fifteen years wanting nothing more than to be older. Once you start hitting those milestone birthdays, 30, 40, 50, you quickly realize how fast your life is passing you by, and your outlook on time begins to drastically change.
As a kid, you spend roughly 12.5 percent of your time or 50 percent of your days sitting in school. We spend 25 percent of the prime years of our life working for a paycheck. You spend a third of your life sleeping, so when you factor in eating, showering and pooping (not necessarily in that order) that doesn’t leave much time for everything else.
And when you have a life altering event, when you enter things like a serious illness or permanent disability into the equation, let’s just say that you find that you have a newfound appreciation for Mr. Segar’s brutally honest against the wind analogy.
On the Clock
Since one of the purposes of this blog is to educate people about what it’s like to live life with a disability, I thought I would take this opportunity to provide my perspective on time, having lived more than half of my life now as someone who is statutorily blind.
For starters, I guess I’ve personally grown to appreciate and respect the finite nature of time because of what happened to me when I got sick. Back when I was a full-time patient, there was a five-year blip in my life that I will never be able to get back, five years that I can only describe as having been stolen from me. Back before they had diagnosed my condition as an auto-immune disorder, every time I would experience a major flare up in my eye, I would have to spend these two to three week stretches in the hospital so that I could receive twice-a-day intravenous doses of steroids and antiviral medication. When I wasn’t stuck in the hospital, I was constantly going back and forth to doctor’s appointments, getting lab work done or filling prescriptions.
When I first got sick, all I wanted was for time to speed up, whether it was a particular hospital stay, my long-term treatment plan or whatever else, time was an annoying obstacle to overcome to get to that next milestone. At first, I struggled with finding ways to pass the time, there’s only so much TV that you can watch or books on tape you can listen to. But as time dragged on, I found that I was getting more and more used to the hours spent alone, and at one point I had almost surrendered to my loneliness, feeling like that innocent person sitting in their jail cell hour after hour who one day just gives up and accepts the unjust sentence that has been handed down to them. Eventually, I emerged from this mental funk, and after things stabilized with my health I began taking steps to get my life back on track. But I can’t help but look back at those times and wish I could do it all over again, because in retrospect, I now realize what a cherished gift I had, countless days and large portions of my life that I foolishly squandered away.
At the same time, life with a visual disability means that it takes you longer to do most everything, which can serve as an ongoing source of stress and frustration.
For example, using a cane to walk down the street or navigate an unfamiliar building, or even feeling your way around your own house is definitely something that can slow you down. Then again, who has time for sprained ankles and bruised shins?
When I was in college I relied on audio textbooks for all of my classes. I utilized a service through Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D)/Learning Ally which consisted of dozens of four-track cassette tapes. Sometimes RFB&D wouldn’t have a particular title, and I would have to wait until textbooks could be read on tape by Tower Guard student volunteers through the MSU Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities. This primitive form of technology didn’t exactly make listening back easy, and there weren’t a lot of options for quickly jumping back and forth through the material, so if I happened to doze off while listening to a text book, I might have to go back and re-listen to the same chapter over again.
Because I don’t drive, I routinely have to utilize a special transportation service called CATA SpecTran to get to and from appointments. These rides need to be scheduled at least one day in advance, and they work within variable 20-minute pick-up and drop-off windows, which in and of itself takes some time to plan for. And because you might end up being in the van with several other riders, if there are a bunch of stops along the way, your commute might take an hour or longer to get to where you need to be. Since you never want to be late for an appointment and want to make sure that you leave enough time for your meeting, sometimes you arrive 45 minutes early, or have to wait just as long for your pick up afterwards. It’s an imperfect, but extremely valuable service, and like many other realities that come along with being blind, you often find yourself sacrificing convenience for necessity.
In addition, when you are blind and have to rely on your computer’s assistive technology, inevitably you are having to wait for your screen reader software to read text back to you. Whether it’s going over something that you just typed in or having it read aloud a new email in your inbox, it’s a new way of doing things that can be time consuming and can take some getting used to. Similarly, using the “voiceover” feature on the iPhone requires you to tap the screen once to announce a letter on the keyboard and tap twice to select the letter, so manually typing out an email or text might be a task that will take a blind person three or four times as long to complete. Luckily, a lot of the newer devices include dictation features which can help to cut down the time it takes to draft an email or long text, although this technology is not perfect, and you end up having to go back through and make a fair amount of corrections due to the limitations of speech to text. As you start to master the assistive technology, you find that normally tedious tasks like reviewing and proofing a document can become an iterative process that is part art and part science. With practice, you can train your ears to pick up on the most subtle of typos or grammatical errors, often times things that spellcheck might have missed. Ideally, your brain and fingers pick up where your ears left off, jumping into action and getting to work making the necessary corrections through a feverish symphony of keystrokes and short-cut commands, that somehow you find you are able to effortlessly conjure up from your years of experience having used the screen reader software.
I make this part sound easier than it is, because we know how quickly technology changes. For someone who has to use assistive technology, all of this change could mean that you are simultaneously dealing with a double or triple learning curve. For example, about six months ago I upgraded to a new Lenovo Thinkpad Model T480 Business laptop. At the same time, I had to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, purchase a Microsoft 2019 Home & Business license, and upgrade to JAWS 2020. So, I was dealing with a new computer,, new operating system and I had to get used to all of the changes/upgrades with the latest versions of Microsoft Office and JAWS. That being said, this commitment to continuous improvement by investing the time to constantly learn new skills and technologies is of course a cornerstone of Accessiversity Labs, and is one of those activities that represents a big slice of the pie chart for how I end up spending a lot of my time.
Even the way I tell time has changed a lot over the last 25+ years. When I first lost my sight I had a small, wallet sized talking clock that I used to carry around with me. I quit using the talking clock after it’s rooster alarm sound effect unexpectedly started going off during a crowded legislative event that I was attending in one of the big conference rooms at Capital Area Michigan Works! (CAMW!) I was so worried about drawing attention to myself and the potential embarrassment that would come along with exposure, that I did the next best thing. I looked around like everyone else was doing and pretended to search for the source of the elusive noise, quite a cunning ruse that actually seemed to work, as I was able to use the distraction to muffle the electronic crows originating from my pant pocket long enough to avoid detection. When I started at CAMW! I also had an old flip phone with zero accessibility features. If I arrived at work before 7 a.m. (which was a pretty common occurrence), the time that the security system would shut off and the keycard for the doors would unlock, I would call my office number and let it ring until my voicemail would pick up. Then I’d call right back and start going through the prompts to retrieve my messages, just so that I could tell what time it was by the timestamp on the voicemail message. Of course, this all became unnecessary when I got my first iPhone, because telling time became as simple as hitting the home button, since the built-in “voiceover” feature automatically reads aloud the current time as it is displayed on the home screen. If I had my ear buds in I could simply depress the home button and speak into the microphone on the volume control, and with the new wireless Bluetooth devices, I just have to gently tap on one of the Air Pods twice to activate Siri. If I’m on my computer, the time is always a quick insert-F12 keystroke away with the JAWS screen reader, and if I’m within range of our Google Home, I can say “Hey Google, what time is it?” and the virtual assistant will respond almost instantaneously.
Would You Look at the Time
Like all of you (Bob Seger included) I’m on the ride of my life, not quite knowing how much longer I have or exactly when the ride will end. Between sleeping and pooping I try my best to make the most of the remaining time I have left. In this current environment of working in our pajamas, office hours which are no longer defined by morning commutes or time clocks and punch cards, and the ever present temptation to pause the work day to catch up on Ozark or take an afternoon bike trip, I attempt to strike the right work-life balance, while focusing all of my energy and talents on pursuits that I feel passionate about.
Consequently, this has created a new sense of urgency, especially now that I’m older and I’ve started to experience the accelerated time lapse of life. More than ever, I’m constantly being reminded that I can’t afford to let my disability slow me down. Sure, technology can help, that is, when it's working properly or isn’t distracting me from other things that are more important. Things like a blog post that doesn’t have any real deadline other than some arbitrary timeline that I set for myself. But at the end of the day, along with all of the client work, training and professional development, the family commitments, etc., I know that these moments of reflection are important. These are parts of my life that need to be recorded, things that need to be said, stories that need to be told. So even if it takes me a week to get around to writing a blog post, or I take a couple of extra days to go through it and tweak some parts to make sure it’s just right, I know it’s time well spent.
Grandfather clock I inherited from my grandma. My grandpa Walt hand-built this.