Dead Lines (Jackpot January #3)

Given the nature of this project, it won’t shock you to read that I’ve been thinking about deadlines a lot today. Writing a little something every day, my sole focus is quantity. It is not an endurance test, not the careful, gentle nudge of the editing mind. It’s a sprint. I have 24 hours to get each of these out there. No thinking, only doing.

So when I’m turning over the question of deadlines in my mind (instead of working to meet them), I get caught in monomania. My thoughts grow obsessive and deranged, until ‘deadline’ no longer even feels like a word. What is a deadline anyway? How does a line die? I can’t tell if this is insightful or insane.

But let’s follow this line of thinking: How does a line die? What would it mean?

When I close my eyes and picture a ‘dead line’, I think of cursive that trails off mid-word. I imagine blood-writing on the walls, that ends mid-sentence. An actual deadline is an imposed limit, a way to both ensure and organise a finished product. Deadlines tell us that something will be done, and when we can expect it to be done by. But who are we kidding? Has anyone ever finished a task, handed in an essay, completed an artwork, filled in a form even, and truly believed that their work was done? Death tells us that our work is never done, which is why it can be so hard to accept. All lives stop; no lives conclude. In that sense, then, a deadline can only ever be arbitrary. It’s nothing but a way of forcing yourself to move on.

What happens when you miss a deadline? When you don’t, won’t, or can’t move on?

Recently I’ve noticed that the biggest difference between feeling present and feeling distant in a situation is whether I got shit done beforehand. If I’m out with friends or family and I’m ahead of schedule, I soar. Nothing can stop me. If I’m behind schedule, I feel cramped, like every room I’m in is too small, every landscape too close, so that even my skin seems to be closing in on me. It really is just that.

If the path to wellbeing is staying on top of things, why can I so rarely seem to do it? Two reasons: first, it simply seems too easy. Even if organisation is the secret, I want to resist it because it’s so mundane. I want the answer to happiness to be more magical, though I have no idea how or what that would look like.

Secondly, I keep adding things to the pile. I keep taking on projects. I start things out of impatience, but also so that I don’t have to finish the thing before. It’s not even anxiety, not really, I don’t think. It’s simply that I get older every day and I know I’m not old at all, but I don’t have any way to measure that. All I know is that right now I’m the oldest I’ll ever be, so I’d better get started. Again, it doesn’t feel like anxious attachment, but the end result is the same. I want to do it all, so I refuse to let things go.

And that’s all a deadline is: a way of letting things go. Like a quick plunge into cold water, you just push through it and find out how you did later. Are you fine or hypothermic? You either stick to the deadline or you yourself become a dead line. ‘Dead line’: a phrase which here means an endless, directionless path; a purposeless wanderer; an asymptote, always tending towards a point you will never reach, destined forever to drag yourself through the empty hallway while doors keep closing behind you.