Eat Your Cake

(A follow-up to Finding vs. Making Time)

I showed this to my friend Chris, and he said “I agree, you can’t eat your cake and also have it.”

I’ve always thought that cliche was confusing, because “have” in the context of food sort of colloquially means “eat”, like “I’m going to have some cake” means you’re going to eat some cake. You can’t eat cake and also eat it?

But I’m being wilfully obtuse. Let’s really tuck into this metaphor.

You can’t have your cake—that is, possess this beautifully-decorated object—and also eat it, because the eating negates the having. By eating the cake, you guarantee that you can no longer have it. Cake is consumable.

Time is also consumable. Time is the ultimate consumable, in fact; you consume it whether you want to or not. Imagine you were born with a very large cake and had to spend every moment reflexively eating it. You can never stop eating it, but the cake will eventually be all gone.

You never asked for that cake. Maybe you’d rather try something else once in a while. A crisp salad.

But, no choice. You’ve got this cake and you’re always eating it.

This metaphor is groaning under the weight of the point I’m trying to make so:

Time. You get some amount of it, and all the things you want, need, or are forced to do consume some portion of that amount.

If you want to do a thing, like writing, which is bound by time (you can’t spend an hour writing and have it only consume five minutes of time), the only way to “find” or “make” the time is to do writing instead of doing other things. Consume time by writing, instead of consuming it some other way, which includes doing “nothing”, like sleeping, or lying on the floor staring at the ceiling wondering why you’re cursed by the drive to pursue creative expression when Netflix is so much easier.

You can’t both possess cake and also eat it. You can’t spend all your time doing everything other than writing, and also write.

It starts and ends there: you either spend some of that time you’re forced to eat by writing, or… you don’t.