In this last year I have been struggling with the movement of the clock. Sometimes it moves very slowly. Sometimes it moves so fast that a week feels like a day. And sometimes it seems to not move at all. Time has such an impact on our lives, doesn’t it?
We all have pda’s, iPhones, or Blackberrys to make sure that we are perfectly doling out our 24 hours in a day. We set appointments back to back so that we ensure that we will be running all day long. We try to stuff more things into a day than anyone could really accomplish and then we beat ourselves up at the end of the day when we haven’t done everything we set out to do. Essentially we have made sure that we won’t succeed when by creating a “to do” list that would take three people “to do” in a day. Why do we do this? What is our need to make lists that are at least twenty items long? Why do we allow time to dictate our lives instead of us dictating the time in our lives.
I often think about time and how if we aren’t worried about how much of it we do or don’t have then we are regretting what we did with it in past or wishing that we had made better use of it. Then we seem to spend the rest of the time waiting for things to get better. Time…tick…tock….it speeds up and we move into hyperdrive. Tick tock…it slows down and we whine about why nothing is happening. Tick…tock….we worry that we won’t have enough of it. Tick….tock….we wish that we could be through it and retired.
I think the only real way to handle time in your life is to make friends with it. To acknowledge that time is huge in our society because we need pressure to help us move. With time “crunches” we push ourselves to move forward in careers we might not like or to get projects done we really wish we didn’t have to do. With “procrastination” we have some power over time showing that we decide when we do something….no one rules us. But it’s elusive power since eventually what you have been procrastinating about you will actually have to accomplish.
So tick….tock….how do we make friends with time? I’ll tell you, it’s fairly easy in thought but maybe a lot harder in theory. The way we make friends with time is to stop looking at the future….but stay in the moment. Be in the time right now. Be in this second, minute, or hour. Doesn’t mean we can’t know that there is a future, we just don’t have to be obsessed with it. We don’t have to be craning our necks to the farthest hour when we could just stand happily in the hour we already have at our disposal.
Once you do that it changes the perspective of not only your day but your ability to do what you need to do. Instead of creating a list that will effectively drown you in its weight, you can say “What can I do right this minute?” Then do that….right this minute. Once you have finished that you can ask again, “What can I do right this minute?” And so on and so forth until you find that by being in the minute you actually accomplish far more than struggling under a time frame and a list ten miles long. Set small goals that can be accomplished right this minute and then find that by adding up all the minutes in your day you have done what you needed to do.
And don’t forget to put on those lists…..Smile! Look up at the sky! Eat an ice cream cone! Laugh! Meet a friend for coffee! These are important items to your life list and you need to make those priorities since these items are what life is REALLY about!
