The Scavenger Hunt For More Time
Time is both simple to understand and incomprehensible. It feels like something we generally grasp, but also like something where we are often missing the point entirely. When we are little, we’re taught time in units of measure. Hours, minutes and seconds. Hands on a clock, spinning around and around at different speeds. Days and months, seasons and years. Trips rotating around the sun as we also rotate at a different pace around an axis.
And then it gets more complicated. We learn how time can speed itself up, turning minutes into seconds when we’re having fun with our friends. How time can stretch minutes into hours if we are grumpy about doing our chores. The complexity keeps building as we continue to grow up.
Before we know what happened, we’re adults still struggling with time management. When our calendars are overwhelming, we probably wish that our parents and teachers would still tell us what we need to do and when. But instead we sigh and know that somehow, we’ll figure it out. We don’t know how we suddenly got this old, but our childhoods feel like a whole lifetime ago.
There are days when we feel like we have all the time in the world. And then there are days when we know that’s not true. Those are the days that remind us of our own mortality. That we will not have time for all the things we’ll ever decide we will want to do. We will have to choose and choose, for all the todays that we get. At one point, we learn that our dreams can be infinite even though our lifetime will not be.
That’s the lesson that teaches us to leap anyway, even when we’re scared. To buy the plane ticket. Because we only get one life and we don’t want ours to end with a wish that we’d done more with the time we had. One day we all become afraid of that. But it doesn’t bother us that one day we might wish we had more time. Because if we are lucky, we’ll leave a few people behind with the same wish. For one more day together, even though that’d never be enough.
And that’s what a lifetime really is anyway. Time moving in all it’s different directions and paces, and the connections between moments. An opportunity to make an impact on the world, and to leave behind stories that our loved ones will tell for years to come. Our lifetime is a chance to exist in this space and time. To live whatever life we do in a single blink of existence’s eye.
But that’s what can paralyze us. The open-endlessness and the finiteness of time. We spend years assuming we have so much of it, only to have a single day remind us that time’s actually quite a bit more precious than that. Because years often go by faster than the months, and if we forget to pay attention, we end up spending none of our time how we meant to.
It’s too easy for our calendars to get overrun by to-do lists and other people’s priorities. We say yes to so many invitations that we don’t have enough time left to say yes to ourselves. Day after day filled by little urgencies that mechanically move us from dawn until dusk. We expend all our energy, then we never find the time to refill ourselves. Because on all the days we’re over-scheduled, it feels easiest to cancel a meeting for one.
There’s a way to hack the system though. The cheat code is this: You will never find the time, so you’ll need to make the space instead. That thing you want to do more of? Well, it turns out that you can’t add more hours to the day, so you’ll just have to do less of something else. You might even have to move something to the back burner. And you’ll have to be okay with that.
Author’s note: One of my goals this year is to find my way back to consistency on this little blog of mine. Back to publishing something new every Tuesday. That didn’t happen how I pictured it would this first month of this new year. So instead, please enjoy this second of four days in a row of resolution(ish)-themed content to close out January. I hope to greet you again with consistency, beginning on February 7th.
