A Trick of Time

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“How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and there will never be a time that is not now.” – Gerald Jampolsky

I wake up between 5 and 5:30am every morning. I don’t use an alarm but I have a clock that projects the time and the temperature onto the ceiling of my bedroom. So I open my eyes, look at the ceiling to orient myself and then roll out of bed.

This clock, that I’ve had for about 15 years, never needs to be set. It synchronizes with something out in the ether, that I have nicknamed the mother ship since I’m unclear what it is, and so with every time change or when it restarts after it has lost power, it is automatically updated.

Every once in a while, like 4-6 times a year, it does a funny thing. It gets out of sync and then is 40 minutes early. It might display 5:10 am but it’s really 4:30am. When this happens, I glance at the ceiling, get out of bed and it isn’t until I’m feeding the cat that I realize “I have an extra 40 minutes!”

<cue the oohs and aahs>

Forty extra minutes for doing yoga, reading, meditating, and writing my daily post. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a weekday or weekend, it feels luxurious. I hold my yoga poses a few beats longer, I read an extra meditation passage or two, I linger longer on the words I write.

But it doesn’t mean that I get anything more done. Whether I have an hour and a half or two hours before I get my kids up, doesn’t produce any measurable difference in productivity. Perhaps my closing sentence on my post is more thought-out but largely the difference is that I start the day with a sense of abundance.

Of course I could train my body to get up at 4:30am every day but then I’d expand my list of things I think I could get done. The trick seems to be in granting myself the permission to linger and not hurry through these things that matter most for my self-care and connection to the pulse of life and community. Because I have not yet mastered bestowing that gift upon myself, I rely on my clock to remind me of that lesson every now and again.

After I mentioned this clock behavior to my brother a while back, he looked at me as if I was crazy not to get rid of it. But why would I dispose of something that gives me the gift of time?  

(featured photo from Pexels)

15 thoughts on “A Trick of Time”

  1. The unexpected gift of extra free time is always such a blessing and a gift. And you are wise to not immediately jump to fill it with other things but rather to linger and take an extra few minutes to enjoy your morning routine! 🙏

    I wonder why 40 minutes of all things. Might be a deeper meaning behind that from the Mothership!

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    1. Such a good question about the 40 minutes. And it’s never that the clock runs late – always early. I like your idea of investigating the bigger meaning behind this gift… 🙂 ❤

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    3. Maybe the Universe believes if it gave me an hour, I wouldn’t use it wisely so all I get is an extra 40 minutes? 🙂 Or maybe more realistically – I know the temperature comes from a sensor I put on the front porch. Maybe the time comes from a geosynchronous satellite and every once in a while goes off line and my clock syncs with the next one out there?

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    1. Neither had my parents when they came to stay about 10 years to take care of my dog. They kept wondering what was on the ceiling! It’s really unobtrusive and I like it — although in the summer time when the sun comes up really early, it’s hard to see on the ceiling.

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  6. And now you sent me to Voices to read that entry and enjoy it. Beautiful. I love your conclusion, “The gift of abundance comes in many forms. One can have an abundance of misery or an abundance of joy. It is a matter of choice.”

    An abundance of wisdom shared! Thank you, Julia!

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