Time

I often hear there's not enough time. Or that time is flying. Or where did the time go. There's also statements related to time wherein it speaks to time being slow or time being fast. Lately I've been experiencing the quality of time where a full day or a full week will have gone by and it's hard to remember that week of time or that day of time. So I've been thinking about it a lot.

I find when I'm deeply in creative space working on a project that has a lot of meaning to me or that is meticulous or even fun, that I do not process time in the same way. I find that it escapes me - the actual registering of time. As I've been reflecting on time I've also been reflecting on the negative qualities we relate to it. Where time is going too fast or time is going to slow. Both have qualities of negativity attached to them. So is there ever a time that's just right that falls within the parameters that feel good to us, where we feel full of time.

It has me thinking about the use of qualifying time. I'm wondering if it's the time that's good or bad or our relationship to how we've spent it. If it's our relationship to the time is there a way to evolve how we relate to it? I think there is. But I don't think that we can all evolve our relationship to time in the same way. Saying that, I've been finding three things particularly useful as I try to evolve my relationship to time.

The first thing has been acknowledging that I have a relationship to time and investigating what that means. This gives me some idea of how I view time personally and how my relationship to it affects me on a day-to-day basis. I have to say that I fall well within the parameters of the masses wherein I negativeize my time on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. And I don't really want to do that anymore. So in comes the next step. I've been taking stock as often as I remember to, meaning I look around a bit, acknowledge what I am doing, and give a few moments to reflect what's happening now.

Now I'm painting green onto this canvas, now I'm doing the dishes, now I'm writing a blog post. It seems to anchor me in the moment and minimize my potential for allowing the time tropes of too fast and too slow to bully my thoughts about.

Finally, I've been qualifying time less often. Too slow, too fast, too hard, too emotional, when will it end, that was over too soon, life is flying by - no. Just no. It's too frantic for me. It provides my illusion of control too much fuel. I’m taking a timeout from grading my experiences with time.

In this, I'm finding some relief from the sneaky pressures that show up when we put too much stock in how we've spent our time. We're all going to breathe with our individual rhythms. We're all going to engage with this life in a variety of ways. I encourage having a look at how we relate to what we call time and seeing if there's anywhere you can find spaciousness. It's been a beautiful tool for me to disengage from the self flagellation that comes with having too much, or too little, time.