How can our relationship to time contribute to the life we want to live?
Time is at the heart of everything we do and want.
Time is that precious, often taken for granted, commodity, which often seems to be in short supply:
‘I can’t afford to spend any more time on this.’
‘This isn’t a good use of time.’
‘This isn’t time well spent.’
We even ‘invest’ time.
Time is an impossible balance. We have too much spare time, not enough time, and are then asking ‘where did the time go’ because ‘this wasn’t meant to take so long’ as we constantly bemoan there aren’t enough hours in the day, that we wish we had more time, often for the things that are most important to us. We treasure the skill of time management, which is often conflated with productivity or fitting as much into the confines of time as possible.
Time is a gift. We give our time to people and projects, we offer others the chance to take their time or put people at ease when we reassure them that they have ‘all the time in the world’.
Time is all these things because without time there is nothing. Time is the fabric into which we weave our lives, which interweave with those other twines that make up the tapestry of life. Time, as we know it is infinite, but our time is not, our thread runs out.
So time is a contradiction: infinite and finite; ours and no ones; limited and unlimited; a feeling and a measurable unit; subjective and objective.
It is within that contradiction that we live and in which our relationship to time can shape not only the quality of the time we spend but how we spend it. That relationship to time can shed light on to our relationship to us, to what matters to us, to what we really want and in how we spend our time, how much we are giving ourselves the space to be and pursue what we want.
Time is a relationship
In a day, what are all your experiences of time? Write down a rough outline of everything you have done in the day and how each thing felt in relation to time.
Perhaps hurried as meetings overrun and you need to be somewhere else, bored as you wait for the moment something is due to happen, exhausted as you try to keep up with time passing and overwhelmed by what you want to do with what little time you have.
Possibly we find ourselves lost in unallocated time. What do we do or do we feel we should do with the pockets of time we didn’t expect to have? Maybe we even feel fear. For who am I in this unplanned time where I don’t need to do anything, be anywhere or anyone?
Maybe even longing. Longing for free time, or the dreamy holiday time where time can be for anything and feels like a warm lagoon to float along.
In each case how we feel about time - whether rushed or relaxed - comes down to how we relate to it. By relate, we mean what we expect of ourselves at a specific time.
The truth is that objectively, time is constant, it moves at the same rate, its passing never changes. In fact, time is perhaps the most consistent thing in our lives, but our view and feeling of time is perhaps one of the most inconsistent.
Our relationship to time is a mirror on our relationship to us
So the great variable in our relationship to time is us. What we expect and demand and want from us in a moment or timeframe and the extent those hopes and expectations match reality in time all depend on us.
And how we see us often comes down to how we fare in time to our expectations.
If we want to get an insight into our relationship to ourselves and how we live our lives versus the lives we want then all we have to do is look at time.
Given all the time in the world, what would your life look like?
Considering your answer, how does that compare to how your time looks now?
What do you give your time to?
How do you decide what you give your time to?
How do you most often feel about time?
How much time do you give to what matters to you?
Another way to consider this is to ask what do we need our relationship to time to be to live the life we want to live.
If you ask yourself the following questions:
What are the qualities you want in life?
What really matters to you and what do you want there to be space for?
What does that mean in terms of how you approach time? What is the quality of time you need?
Looking at your answers, do you currently give yourself the time to be the person you want to be, to live the life you want to live?
For example, if ease is an important quality in my life, it means I have to notice when I am trying to do too much in too little time and consider what needs to change if ease is a non-negotiable.
Our answers can reflect where are time goes and where it needs to be for us to be and to live the life we want. It is an opportunity to remember, like an relationship, we have an active role to play.
Our time is our gift
The time we have is a gift to us that we must choose how to use. When we use our time we are also gifting it to whatever we devote our time to. Another way of framing it is sacrificing time. The original meaning of the word sacrifice is literally ‘to make sacred’. So by giving our time or sacrificing our time, what are we deeming sacred?
While time is a contradiction, knowing how we approach our time, what we give our time to and how that compares to what we want, creates the awareness to consider if this is what we want.
Our relationship to time is a choice.
We have to choose what we want to make sacred and how we want our time to feel. Those two answers, how we want it to be, alongside what we currently do will show us where we may need to reframe our relationship with time and in doing so our time.
The reality is we have all the time in the world, how we choose to spend it? That is up to us and only time will tell.
