Time – we use it, make
it, spend it, mark it, waste it, kill it, lose it and bemoan its passing. It’s
a gift and yet we often see it as a burden.
When we are small
time seems to move so slowly because we have no concept that it’s a commodity
that may run out. We can spend hours just doing Lego or playing make-believe,
‘waste’ a whole afternoon in the sandpit, or fall asleep half-way through a
tidy-up.
School starts the
shift – it demands our time and attention. It insists we must concentrate,
corral our thoughts, and organise our time. Then as the pressure increases in
high school indoctrination begins into the myth that ‘Happiness is always a
step, and therefore a piece of time, away’. When we get a good final score at
school then we’ll be happy (never mind that we’re spending the most exploratory
time of our lives in a state of stress); when we get our degree, happiness
awaits (oops there go the early 20’s); don’t worry we’ll find it when we get a
job or life partner– oh well maybe a better job (or better life partner!). Now we’re
racing through the 30’s and into the 40’s and still can’t seem to catch our
breath or grasp that elusive happiness in anything more than occasional snatches.
Not only that but we start to notice the time that has passed in life against
the balance of what may be left, and panic or despondency set in.
What we don’t realise
is that there is only one accessible moment in time and that is NOW, this very moment
and it is our choice whether or not we savour it. We cannot complain about time
when we spend most of it living in our head considering a place in the future,
or worse caught in the thrall of a moment long gone when we “shoulda, coulda,
migtha!”
We turn conversations
that lasted minutes into hours of repetition and editing, or devote swathes of
time to planning a future when we will get everything right.
Our experience of
time, however, only exists outside of us if that is how we are determined to perceive
it, time actually is ours to own. If we live consciously we can choose what our
relationship with it is. If we choose to stop experiencing our lives as a
series of tasks to be ticked off at the end of a day, we can begin to live in
the moment fully committed to and mindful of the current activity. We can also
begin to be the child again, engaging organically with whatever we are doing.
We can draw time, and indeed people, to us by being totally present in every
conversation (kids especially know if you are really present or just wanting
them to hurry up so you can get the lawn mown, or emails answered or TV show
watched!) If life seems rushed, expand it by shutting off the mind and its
endless lists and demands, sitting in peace and stillness, if only for a few
moments, and with the breath drawing in calm and releasing tension.
But I’m a working mum
who has busy kids I hear you cry – well then when rushing child 1 from (a) to (b)
be aware of their presence and of your time together rather than worrying about how
you then have to get child 2 from (c) to (d). And if child 2 decides they don’t
feel like activity (x) then don’t fret frantically on how best to fill the sudden space, take
a slow deep breath and head to a park and sit together connecting with the
ground and each other until it is time to head back to retrieve child 1 at
place b doing activity (y)!
Surely the aim of
this journey is not to look back and wistfully say, “Where did the time go?” or
“If only I had my time again….” But rather to claim, “Life …I owned every
moment of it!”
