Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check it’s watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out. – Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper.
I’ve set myself the almost (at times) insurmountable task of being a (mostly) daily blogger. However impossible this seems, I’ve achieved seven-plus years at my keyboard, writing posts for ‘The Ville’ first, and then ‘Yoga with Eve Grzybowski’.
I used to blog in the evening, but, sadly, some nights I would sit at my computer and nothing would come into my heard. Eventually, I would start clicking away, but all-up, a post could take 90 minutes or more to write.
With my nighttime writing, I felt the oppression of time running out, as in the above quote. I didn’t want to have to stay up late writing when I could be doing more fun activities, like reading a book or doing a cryptic crossword puzzle. It took me a while before I learned that what I needed to do was get a hold of myself and choose to be doing what I was doing. Choosing made all the difference because I not longer felt powerless.
It’s amazing what can happen in the act of choosing. To get over that time-is-running-out feeling at the end of the day, I realised I could start posting during the daytime. As I’m semi-retired, I keep imagining that I have lots of time. However, if I don’t manage it, I can feel as stressed out and impossibly busy as a full-time worker.
It’s not that keeping track of time in and of itself is oppressive. It’s being a victim of it. A girlfriend of mine told me about a way she discovered to change her relationship with time.
Jenny is a yoga teacher. She kept giving herself a hard time as she went through repeated periods of stressed-out busyness, followed by getting sick or collapsing from fatigue. Finally, she decided that what she needed to do more of was ‘take her own sweet time’.
Like a lot of simple notions, it’s not easy to go more slowly. It might mean stepping out of the strong pull of a current that’s not even yours to find your own rhythm. Or, saying no to activities that will push you over your energetic limits. Or, breaking a lifelong habit of feeling things are urgent even when they aren’t.
Yoga practice is a good place to try on new attitudes. If you’d like to improve your relationship with time, perhaps you can give yourself an opportunity on a weekend when you set aside ‘empty time’ for your yoga – with no agenda and completely open-ended. It could be a somewhat scary act, but, on the other hand, it could offer a new-found freedom that spills over into the rest of your life.
Hi Eve, I tried to ‘Like’ the post but the button wouldn’t work for me. Justin
Hi there, Justin,
We just tried the ‘like’ button and it seemed to work. Give it another go and let me know what happens.
Kindly, E
Must be the computer 🙂
For me it’s that moment of choice: Do I “Just Do It” or do I put it off for another time. Being a master procrastinator, I sadly put things off far too much. Thanks for this inspiration.