The Next
Hour

Most of us are waiting for something. Friday. Summer. Retirement. A little more money or a little more time. We wait for the kids to get older, for things at work to settle down, for the bills to get caught up, or for whatever trouble we're carrying today to finally get out of the way. Then, we tell ourselves, we'll get around to living the way we intended. Trouble is, life doesn't seem particularly interested in getting out of the way.

I came across a saying the other day: “Live your life by the hour, not by the day. What will you achieve in the next hour?” It was one of those things you see on the internet, accompanied by a picture of some ancient-looking fellow sitting above a city, staring toward the mountains as though he's figured out something the rest of us haven't. Usually I scroll right past that sort of thing. This one stayed with me.

It wasn't the part about achievement. I'm not sure every hour needs to achieve something. I've spent some pretty good hours in my life doing absolutely nothing anyone would put on a résumé. It was the hour that got me. An hour is an honest piece of time. A year isn't. A year lets you make promises: This is the year I'm going to. You can promise to lose weight, write the book, get out of debt, fix up the house, call your brother more, or finally learn something new. January is full of promises like that.

An hour doesn't give you much room for promises. You probably aren't going to change your life in the next sixty minutes, but you can change what you do next. Write a page instead of a book. Make the call you've been putting off instead of repairing years of silence in one conversation. Walk a mile instead of getting yourself into shape. Sit down, open the bills, and quit pretending you don't know they're there. There's something useful about a measure of time small enough that the excuses have trouble fitting inside it.

Sometimes the next thing isn't even that ambitious. Wash the truck. Take the dog out. Read ten pages. Call one of the kids. There's dignity in small things completed, though we don't talk about that much anymore. We like beginnings—new jobs, new houses, new relationships, new years. Everybody likes the photograph taken at the starting line. The middle is different. The middle is Tuesday afternoon, and nobody takes a picture of that. Yet that's where most things worth doing are actually done, one ordinary hour at a time.

The next hour doesn't much care what shape the rest of your day is in, either. It works the same in a hospital waiting room as it does on a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. A man sitting through a bad diagnosis can still decide what to do with the next sixty minutes—call his daughter, ask the nurse her name, look out the window instead of at the clock. That's not a saying on the internet. It's just true. The hour doesn't ask what kind of day you're having before it shows up.

I don't mean we should turn life into some kind of production contest. I have no desire to account for every sixty minutes of my day and decide whether I used them efficiently enough. Some hours ought to be wasted, at least by somebody else's accounting. An afternoon fishing when the fish aren't biting. Sitting on the porch watching weather come across the hills. A long breakfast with nowhere you have to be. I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of the best parts of life don't produce anything. They simply happen, and you were there.

As we get older, time begins playing a strange trick. Something that happened thirty years ago doesn't always feel thirty years away. You can remember the room, the weather, what somebody said, maybe even what was playing on the radio. Then you do the arithmetic and wonder where in hell thirty years went. It didn't go anywhere all at once. It went Tuesday morning, Thursday afternoon, and Saturday night. It went in cups of coffee, drives to work, dinners, arguments, birthdays, a kid's ballgame you almost missed, and a thousand ordinary conversations we were certain we'd remember but didn't. One hour followed another until there were thirty years behind us.

I suppose that's what bothered me about that little saying. We speak of life as though it's this great thing stretching from birth to death, and of course it is. But none of us ever gets to hold the whole thing in our hands. We only ever have the piece we're standing in. The next hour may be enough to begin something or finish something. It may be enough to say what should have been said a long time ago, to change your mind, forgive somebody, or decide that whatever happened yesterday doesn't get this hour too. It may also be enough to sit quietly, watch the snow come down, and understand that, for the moment, you're here.

There will always be something ahead of us—something to finish, something to fix, somewhere we're supposed to be. We spend a surprising amount of our lives waiting for those things to be over, as though the real part will begin once everything's finally arranged to our satisfaction. Maybe we have it backward. The unfinished page. The coffee getting cold. The garden gone to seed. The person sitting across from us, waiting for us to look up.

And if we're lucky, we get another hour.