Do you always feel you are going to be late because of your children?
I did. But also, I am a nut about being on time.
My concept of time tends to be very linear. One step leads to the next to the next. When I need to be somewhere I start marking out my steps so I can get to where I am going on time. However it was clear from a very young age, my daughter didn’t live in linear time like I did. She had her own sense of time and space, based more in the present moment. It drove me crazy.
Because she wasn’t basing her actions on the past nor using that template for the future, she would look at me like I was speaking gibberish when I pushed her to hurry because we had to be on time.
I thought by the time she was a teenager I had instilled in her my strongly held belief around the urgency of time. But nope. She seemed not at all worried about this lateness thing I carried. She hadn’t absorbed the memo that time went from A to B to C, and other people were waiting for you and you needed to show up.
The more I talked about time, the more frustrated I got that she wasn’t on my timing.
I can be quite forceful and I imagine you can too. I used my whole arsenal of “power over” moves, followed up by the “consequences” knock out punch to try to force her into ‘my’ time, without much success.
Eventually I stopped judging her and got curious – what was it like to live in the land of “no time”?
I discovered that of the two of us, she was pretty relaxed and I was the one who was super stressed, living under this taskmaster of time. Perhaps you feel this too?
During these current times, where there is not a high demand to go many places, to arrive “on time”, maybe it is possible to shift something here, to try a new experiment.
Tomorrow, or sometime this week, spend the whole day without looking at the clock, without scheduling yourself like ‘now we have to eat’, ‘now we have to brush teeth’, ‘now we have to get to school’. Explore this and see what happens. Do you begin to relax more? And do things still get done? This was my biggest fear, that if I didn’t drive events and keep my daughter ‘on time”, things were just not going to happen.
This may feel true for you and you may believe it’s true, but right now is the greatest opportunity to find out. Notice what happens when you don’t have the external pressure dictating you have to be on time or else.
I love how time keeps coming up, so try it out, see what happens. Let me know. I’m curious to hear how it is for you to step out of linear time entering the moment.
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