ANEW: The Luxury of Time

May we give children what they need to thrive - in abundance.

(Photo by Thom Gonzalez/Pexels)

Rarely these days do I get so tired I can barely see straight—but today is one of those days.

When you don't have anyone to answer to, you can move with your own rhythm. You can shape time around yourself like clay. But lately, I feel like I'm rehearsing for re-entry—into someone else's timetable, someone else’s expectations.

Being accountable only to yourself is, I’m realizing, a privilege. A luxury of the rich.

Let me explain.

Each weekday morning, I write with a small circle of women—each of us showing up on Zoom to say what we’re working on. That’s it for an hour from Monday through Friday. Just a moment of presence and naming. Yet it’s held me together this year. It’s made me feel seen. They are brilliant, accomplished women—I’ve Googled a few. But we are equals here, tethered to one another through the simple act of showing up. That has been, until now, the extent of my daily accountability.

But time has its own demands.

I remember as a boy growing up with my brother and mother in the Projects in Robbins, Illinois, time was different in watching my mother march us into the morning, getting all of us ready for school. As a child, being accountable meant hustling. Moving quickly. Cramming oatmeal or cream of wheat into your mouth. Then we split—each in our own direction. Different schools. Different destinations. All of us in motion.

School, when I look back, wasn’t just “sitting and getting.” It was moving from space to space, often at the ring of a bell, trying not to lose things—coats, books, mittens—leaving behind little trails of ourselves across hallways and sidewalks. That was time, then. That was school.

And as we grew older, that motion didn’t stop. It just changed shape. If your early work was in caretaking—of children, of elders, of communities—then your mind became a chessboard. Always three steps ahead. If not, you might have measured time in deadlines. But it’s rare, truly rare, to find ourselves with the kind of spaciousness that lets us be accountable only to the work of our own soul.

That’s where I am now. It feels like my early twenties again. My days open, blue-sky wide.

Reading is like that. Writing, especially. When you live in the world of story or spirit or imagination, every hour holds possibility. That kind of life is rich.

But most people—especially in poor and working-class communities, especially in communities of color, especially among immigrant families—aren’t afforded that kind of time. Their days are structured by systems that constrain and surveil. I have friends who lead schools where their students, or the parents of their students, live in fear—of detention, of deportation, of losing everything despite having done everything “right.”

Time, for them, is not luxurious. It’s perilous.

Around the world, children are being hustled through systems—not just schools, but shelters, checkpoints, borders. Their families must ask: Will my child be safe today? Will they return home tonight?

That kind of fear redefines everything. It rearranges time. It makes joy feel like a risk.

I want us to consider this: that time itself is experienced differently, unequally. That while some of us wrestle with our calendars and to-do lists, others are wrestling with survival. That while some children lose mittens on school buses, others lose countries. Or parents. Or peace of mind.

The pursuit of happiness—remember that phrase? I’ve come to believe it was always meant to be about time. The freedom to use it. To have enough of it. To not live in fear that it will be taken from you in an instant.

Seeing time through the eyes of a child, or through the lens of a writer, brings clarity. It reminds us of what matters most.

Because if we pull back—take a 30,000-foot view—we’ll see: time is not equally distributed. Some of it is spent in joy, in creativity, in connection. Some of it is spent in soul-crushing fear. And yet, somehow, people keep moving through it.

For those children. For the writers and dreamers we hold in our imaginations—and, if we’re lucky, in real life. The ones who remind us why we tell stories in the first place. The ones who still believe in wonder, even when the world tries to strip it away. The ones who ask questions no system can answer and who walk into each day hoping, despite everything, that someone will really see them. We stay tethered to them. They are our compass, our anchor, our quiet reason for beginning again.

May it always be so.

Curated Listening:

When my brother and I were growing up, we listened to hours and hours of the Jackson 5. They were like the cousins from Gary, Indiana that we never knew, which was only 45 minutes from where we grew up. So much of our early years growing up were a lot like their upbringing before fame hit. One of my favorite and least heard J5 songs is “Maybe Tomorrow.” Listen to “Maybe Tomorrow” HERE.