Tag: time

The Fullness of Time

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“The years teach much which the days never know.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Miss O has been working on “time” problems in school. Like “It’s 12:40. Zach is supposed to meet his friend in 45 minutes. What time will it be when they meet?” She generally likes math but these problems are getting her goat at the moment.

So, we were settling into bed and she asked me, “Was time around when you were a kid?” Then she thought for a moment and continued, “Oh yeah, they’ve had it for a while.”

I couldn’t get out of the room fast enough to burst into laughter and write that one down. That she said this the night before my birthday wasn’t lost on me.

Hee, hee. Yes, they’ve had time long enough for me to count out 55 years. What else has the fullness of time given me?

Laughter

When we had a small party of family and friends to celebrate my birthday, as well as my mom’s and my friend Eric’s, the thing I enjoyed most was the laughter. Miss O and Mr. D put on a recital. There was great food and also presents, but the real gift was the just the lightness of being. Miss O asked why my eyes leak so frequently when I laugh. I don’t know exactly, but it has something to do with just being so happy to be here.

Perspective

Time has also given me the gift of perspective. It’s a bigger sea in which my hurts, my worries, and even my hopes feel less significant. They matter, but more as in a way that helps me set my sails instead of being the sea itself. I’m a far more patient person – but not because I’ve grown my patience but because the fullness of time helps me settle into the wait.

Heart

I have a favorite quote when it comes to the heart,

“God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.”

-Hazrat Inayat Khan

When I first met that quote, it was like almost everything else that has become my teacher. I thought, “No, no, no.”

But time has shown it is less about heart break and more about giving up control. There are people, things, dreams, and abilities that hurt so much when they go. But the heart has no hands to hang on to them. Leaning into that is like opening windows in my heart so that the breeze can flow through.

So, has anyone figured out the answer to the time problem at the top of the post? Clearly, it’s “Who knows because Zach is always running late? But we’ll hug him when we see him.” 🙂 Or at least that’s the answer that the fullness of time has given me.  

The Quantity versus Quality of Time

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“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” – Michael Althsuler

This post was previously posted on 7/20/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

Last week I was driving in my car with my almost 7-year-old daughter at 8:29am when she said “Darn, I’m always a minute late for my favorite time.” She likes palindromic times – in this case 8:28.

It made me think about what I’ve been working on lately. Life feels hectic – summertime means different routines for each week, forms to fill out for camps, people to coordinate carpools with, a lot of additional details in addition to working my full-time job, taking care of kids and trying to maintain a social life.

In the midst of this, my goal is not to be in a hurry even while living a busy life.

That is to say, to try to be intentional and savor the things I’m doing. For example, I had on my to-do list an item to fix the fence where it had come apart at a post. That activity in and of itself doesn’t really have a high enjoyment value. But the other day when I stepped out to assess the task, I felt the summer sun on my back and saw the green of all the grass and trees around. The flowers of the garden are really flourishing and it’s an incredibly vibrant scene right now.

The task might not be much to talk about – but the scenario is gorgeous. When I hurry, I miss all of that. So I’m trying to take an extra breath or two, how long can that take – 11 seconds if I’m optimizing the length according to the Unified Theory of Breathing? Just a couple breaths add a dimension that makes me think of the quote from Auguste Rodin, “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the opportunity wisely.“

There are two different Greek words that speak to this divide: chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time so when my daughter is saying that she’s a minute late for her favorite time, it’s chronos we’re talking about. Kairos is translated as the “right time” as in now is the right time to step in, speak up or enjoy what I’m doing. I might have to be somewhere at a particular time, as in chronos, but kairos calls me to be mindful of the trip.  

I usually manage to arrive on time, chronos speaking, but I frequently mess up the quality of the time, kairos, in order to do so. In fact, I did that just yesterday when I was hurrying the kids to the car so we’d be on time for our carpool. My almost 3-year-old son wanted to hold the door for his sister and in my desire for efficiency, I didn’t listen to him and missed the right time to enjoy the spark of what he was doing. A small moment that is neither here nor there in the big picture, unless all the small moments are rushed like that.

What I’ve learned is when I manage not to be in a hurry even while life is busy, it prevents me from feeling like I’m a minute late for my favorite time.

How do you approach the quantity versus quality of time? Any tricks to slow yourself down when you are hurrying?

If you aren’t short of chronos, I’ve also posted a related post on the Wise & Shine blog: Speed Reading

(featured photo from Pexels)

Practicing Abundance

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“Plant seeds of happiness, hope, success, and love; it will all come back to you in abundance. This is the law of nature.” – Steve Maraboli

When I was in college, I was in a sorority with a lot of young women from well-off families. This wasn’t a stated objective in the recruiting process, as evidenced by the fact that I got in, but probably the result of legacy and connections. If some of my friends asked their parents for money, they’d come back to find $100 bills in their mail slot. They drove new cars – like beautiful convertibles – and they didn’t even have to share them with their siblings.

I was envious of their money. It seemed like they had it so much easier to me.

Thankfully, I’ve gotten over my envy of money. And not because I drive a brand-new car or have piles of $100 bills lying around.

It’s because I’ve moved on to being envious of people with time. I read something the other day about someone who had time to sit in their garden for a half hour and listen to the birds. I loved it except for the envy hangover I got. And my friend, Eric, has been off for the past three weeks driving through Joshua Tree and connecting with friends to do long-distance bike rides down the California Coast. Oh, how I long to have the time for a lengthy workout free of worry of whether it’ll make me too tired to be a good parent.

I’ve already given up cooking anything complicated, doing the dishes, and folding the laundry so what else am I to do?

I can rationalize away my lack of time – justify that I had oodles of time in my 30’s and 40’s when others were raising their kids. But it doesn’t help. Here’s the only cure I’ve found: practicing abundance.

If I can stop looking for a day to do yard work, I open to the possibility of doing it for fifteen minutes and getting some dirt therapy. Especially this time of year when I find it so cathartic to dig out what’s dead to make room for new growth, I get so much benefit when to keep my head down and only focus on the little patch in front of me. When I do, the same healing that comes from digging in to feel our roots arises. I can make a big difference in a small place.

I’d love to have many moments to string together to have lunch with a friend. Sometimes the pressure of knowing I can’t do this with ALL my friends keeps me from reaching out to ANY of my friends. Ridiculous, I know. When I do schedule something with a dear friend, I try to tack an extra 15 minutes on the end. It’s a cushion that rarely matters to the rest of my schedule and helps me feel the luxury of really being there.  

While I rarely feel the burn of a great workout, I’m often sore so it reminds me that I am always doing something. It might not be a lengthy workout that goes from cardio, strength training, and then a little fun interval at the end, but I have plenty of opportunities to exercise something other than my patience. When I’m on the floor playing, I can be intentional about getting up off the floor without pushing off anything. And I can repeat the exercise a few times to get the extra burn. If I’m out walking with young bike riders, I can run along a little bit too. It’s reminding myself to be conscious of the little steps I’m already doing that seems to make a difference.

My abundance practice is not perfect – but as my meditation teacher, Deirdre, says – that’s it’s called a practice, not a perfect. It’s these little things I learn that keep me from moving on to being envious of youth. Because I wouldn’t give up these pearls of wisdom that I’ve picked up along the way to go back.

(featured photo on Pexels)

Speaking of abundance, I’m grateful for all the places that I have to post and interact. This morning, I’ve also published a complementary piece on the Heart of the Matter blog: The Subtle Shaping of Our Brains

The Next Chapter: Car Talk

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Does anyone remember the car cake when our car turned 100,000 miles and we made a cake for it?

After we blew out the candles, Miss O turned to me and asked, “Are you going to be alive when this happens to me?”

Oh boy. I thought I better not go with the reply that she better get a used car with a lot of miles already on it. So after thinking about it for a few weeks, I’ve written my answer on Wise & Shine: The Next 100,000 Miles

Try Not to Hurry

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“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” – The White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

My sister-in-law was over the other day and told me that ever since she was out sick for a week about 6 weeks ago, she’s felt like she is always running behind. Then she listed all the things she hasn’t done and it struck me that none of them had to do with being on time, but instead were all about what she wanted to do with her time.

It struck a chord in me because I’ve been reading Alan Burdick’s book Why Time Flies (thank you for the suggestion, Dr. Stein) and he talks about all the different ways we use the word time:

Duration – the ability to determine how much time has elapsed between two specific events or to accurately estimate when the next event will occur.

Temporal order – the ability to discern the sequence in which events occurred.

Tense – the ability to discriminate between the past, present, and future, and the understanding that tomorrow lies in a different temporal direction than yesterday.

The “feeling of nowness” – the subjective sense of time passing through us “right now,” whatever that is

Why Time Flies by Alan Burdick

It’s been my goal lately to try not to hurry even when really busy which speaks to that “feeling of nowness” that Alan Burdick describes. It also resonates with an idea that we need to distinguish between what is important to us as opposed to what seems urgent that Gary Fultz wrote about in his post A Good Interruption Solution? “We are all in a different place between the urgent and the important. Let me suggest there is probably not enough time in life to do all of both.“

With all those ideas about “time,” it inspired my post for the Pointless Overthinking blog this week: The Quality versus Quantity of Time.

(featured photo from Pexels)

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)

Dinner for Two

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“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize that they were the big things.” – Robert Brault

Last night was a perfect evening out on my back patio. It was sunny, not too hot with a delightful little breeze. So I decided to BBQ myself a steak and eat outside. This was an unusual amount of effort to cook for myself. Usually I prepare something for my kids and if I haven’t invited another adult to come over and eat with us, I eat what I’ve prepared for them or leftover. I enjoy cooking but since my almost 6-year-old daughter has a particular palate and my almost 2-year-old son still prefers eating those pouches that contain pureed fruits, vegetables and grains that he can suck down himself, cooking for myself doesn’t usually seem worth it. But last night I thought I’d make an exception and BBQ.

I went out to check the steak halfway through and the BBQ was no longer on. I assumed it had run out of propane until I noticed that all the dials were off. My littlest assistant chef must have come by to adjust the temperature.

Eventually I managed to cook the steak, so I set the table with a place for my son and myself (my daughter was busy inside) and sat down in the perfect evening to eat. I had just finished making the first cut when my son hopped out of his chair and came to sit on my lap. We proceeded to tussle over who could hold the knife and since I won, he decided that he’d control dragging my perfectly grilled piece of bread through my plate. In this way, we made it through dinner, talking about the flavors and the weather, finding a place for the halfway eaten food that came back out of his mouth and stretching now and again to reach the off-limits-to-him knife.

I can’t tell whether this means I’m doing parenting right or wrong. After going through the special effort to cook something for myself, am I supposed to maintain my dignity of being able to eat it without dealing with someone else’s regurgitated food? On the other hand, it was an intimate dining experience, one that he’ll soon outgrow and then I assume that I’ll still share with him at a distance but we won’t be literally eating the same food.

As with much of parenting, I suspect that there isn’t a clear line to draw here. So I fall back to what I know in the moment. There will be plenty of steaks in my future so what I need to savor is the feeling of dinner with a handsome young man who can’t get enough of me.

Last Day of School

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“Ah, life grows lovely where you are.” – Mathilde Blind

Today is the last day of school. I’m not very experienced as a parent of a schoolchild since this was our first year and the pandemic conditions have made it a strange year. Virtual learning for most of the year and then they split the class in two sessions, morning and afternoon, to reduce the size and we had half days of in-person learning since April. But we have finished the year such as it was and there is great excitement in the air for the last day of the year.

The feeling of impending freedom. Freedom from schedules, work and worry. Nothing to do and nowhere to be. The pure promise of childhood. If I remember from my childhood, this was the best day of the summer – the one where it all looms before you.

Before it turns into boredom. Nothing to do and nowhere to be. The agony of childhood where there is so much that you are not allowed to do yet. Then you wander through the days of summer and get to August and all of a sudden wonder how you wasted all your freedom.

Funny that I seem to experience time as either too much or too little and I don’t think I’m alone in that. The only remedy that I’ve managed is to be grateful for today. And grateful is a great way to celebrate today because I have a long list specific to the last day of school:

My child learned to read.

For a warm and loving teacher who was able to connect even over the screen.

That we got to practice leaving the house and going to school even for just a couple months.

That there were no COVID outbreaks in the school which bodes well for next year.

That we seem to be starting to repair the social awkwardness caused by a year apart.

And that we are still here and healthy.

So I celebrate the excitement of today for all of us because we made it through a doozy of a year! May the promise of summer freedom bring a bump of joy to us all!