A friend recently said to me, “you can do almost anything in a day.”
He was referring to a project we have been talking about working on together, and how, if we were to devote a day to it, we could make some serious progress. This is true and something we can do, but I’ll put that aside for now. His comment has me pondering this idea of time more generally - how we use it, how we feel about it and how we spend it.
How often do we feel daunted by something before we have started because we worry about how much time it will take or where we will find the time?
How often do we feel like we don’t have enough time to do all that we want to do?
How often do we feel like a day passes and we aren’t sure how it went so quickly or what we even did?
Our linear concept of time has us feeling that it is rushing by, leaving us struggling to keep up - like we are victims of an evil time genie who is out to get us.
This is what I mean:
The moments we have feel precious, elusive, fleeting and too few.
We often feel like we don’t have enough time to accomplish all that we want to.
We can find ourselves moving from one thing to the next in blur of activities, responsibilities, projects and commitments.
We occasionally wish time away.
Other times, we wish time would stop.
We know the value of being present, yet it can feel so hard to stay in the moment.
Thinking about our time this way feels exhausting and overwhelming, like we are on a hamster wheel that won’t stop spinning.
When I start to feel like this - like time is moving and I can’t keep up - I find myself with a warped perception of how long things take. I assign way more time to tasks than they actually require. I’ll look at a “to do” list and imagine that each task will take 30-60 minutes and suddenly my imagined day is gone before I’ve even started. I feel defeated. Then I dive in, focus, and realize that a few of those items only took 2-3 minutes to accomplish, not 30.
I can feel the space opening up. I just had to start - to get “into” my day to realize its potential. When I feel overwhelmed, life feels two-dimensional, like I am watching it vs. living it. But when I can pause the spinning and start the tasks, it starts to feel more three-dimensional, like I am living and experiencing the things as they really are instead of projecting how things will play out.
Time can feel so different based on our perspective, and often we have to shift how we are approaching our time and what we get to do to see it in a new way - to view the possibilities. I am reminded of a little ritual my husband and I had when we were first married:
New to sharing day after day with one another, we would sometimes take time after dinner to flip back through the catalog of the day’s hours, remembering all the things that passed our time. Some days it was lots of things like gardening, house projects, running, dog walking, a trip to the coffee shop, and cooking meals together, and other days it was just one thing - an epic hike, a whole day spent playing a video game, or a day of studying and working. Occasionally, one of us would forget something that had happened and the other would fill in the gap. We recounted our days like this with a sense of pride and excitement. “Look at all that happened over the course of a single day together.” I would go to sleep feeling fulfilled.
This little exercise got us to pause. Instead of rushing to the next thing, we would take a moment to reflect on what had come before. It grounded us, made us feel present and served as a sort of gratitude practice.
I am going to try it right now - pause for 2 minutes to reflect, and I invite you to do the same. What has filled up your day so far? You may be just waking up, you may be at the end of your day - it doesn’t matter. Take 2 minutes. As I write this, it is noon. And here’s what’s happened in my day:
woke up and hit snooze twice
meditated
woke up a sleepy almost 11-year old to go for a morning training ride before it was too hot
let my dog out and cuddled him a bit
made coffee
checked in with my husband
made and ate breakfast
pumped up bike tires
went for a bike ride
showered
drove to the coffee shop
checked in with some friends
sent some emails
wrote
To list things like this, especially when I start feeling as though time is passing and I am missing it, gets me to pause. In this two-minute reflection, I came up with all of the things above. If I spent more time, I could add more details (filling water bottles, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, cooking oatmeal). You can be as detailed or as general as you want to be, but I recommend writing as many things as you can in your few minute reflection. Some of the things feel more consequential than others, but they all happened, they all matter. In reviewing the list, if we feel that some of these things don’t warrant our attention, maybe we do less of them in the future.
This exercise reframes how we think about time, can reduce anxiety and judgement about how we spend time and gives us a chance to appreciate the time we have.
As I get older and continue to feel like time is speeding up, each day can feel truncated, reduced to just a handful of key moments or activities. When I feel like this, I need to remember to pause and consider all that has happened in my day so far. I invite you to do the same. Let it serve as a grounding practice for where you are, where you have been and where you can go. And to do it with a friend or family member can feel even more rewarding - they can help you with the things you may have forgotten.
My friend is right, we can accomplish almost anything in a day.
But first, we need to believe this to be true.
Then we need to be willing to jump into the day and live it. Focus on each individual opportunity instead of looking at a daunting list of tasks.
And then, when we feel overwhelmed or frustrated, it’s worth a quick pause to recap what’s happened so far. From this pivot point, we get to keep going or recalibrate based on how it makes us feel.
Time…such a pesky, lovely concept.