Is time your friend or your enemy? I often find myself fighting against it, as if it’s doing something to me. In reality, time is a gift.
A Time Timer staffer came across a blog post that asks, “What would it take to befriend time? To see time as an ally, a friend--and opportunity?”
We loved it so much we are sharing it with you. Take time to enjoy these wise words.
The Simplest Way to Make More Time for What Matters
What would it take to befriend time? To see time as an ally, a friend even—an opportunity?
Most of us have a much different relationship with time. One that is based on scarcity. The chorus of “I don’t have enough time” reverberates through conversations, social media channels, and personal mutterings.
Redefining our relationship with time isn’t like flipping a light switch. But it is a bit like pumping gas in your car.
I am one of those people that forget to make time to stop at the gas station as the fuel gauge in my car starts to veer towards the red E. I’ve never run out of gas, but the fuel light comes on more than I’d like to admit.
Why exactly would I ignore this gauge? Because of time. I see that the meter traverses from ½ a tank to ¼ of a tank, and I find myself thinking, “I don’t have time to stop and get gas right now. I’ll stop tomorrow.”
But tomorrow becomes the next day, and then the day after that. And by that point, the taunting orange light has been activated. Even then sometimes I ignore it, believing that I’m in a rush.
Except that something funny happens when eventually I pull into the gas station and stop long enough to fill up. The process of putting gas in my car doesn’t take very much time. Though I haven’t timed it, my guess is that from inserting my credit card to activate the machine to replace the nozzle when I’m done, less than five minutes have passed.
Five minutes is forever. Minds can be changed in five minutes. Heartbeats can be elevated (or slowed) in five minutes. Smiles can be shared, laughter can fill a belly, and bodies can be hydrated in five minutes.
In fact, it seems to me that filling up my car with gas offers the perfect reminder of why we need to make time an ally. Cars need gas to function. We, like cars, have our own fuel needs to not just survive but thrive.
Beyond food and water, we need play, we need sleep, we need connection, we need love. But too often, we tell ourselves we don’t have time.
We rush and scramble through the day, moving from one thing to the next, trying to check things off our lists as if productivity is the ultimate indicator of joy. And, more importantly, we tell ourselves that the things we crave will take too much time—time that we do not have.
What if we did have time? What if the things we crave could fill us up, just like gas fills a car, in just a few minutes? What if we could give ourselves permission to savor the unexpected moments instead of just the big, fancy, planned out ones?
Read the full original post here.