Be Real About Time

Reclaim your time...your sense of time as your own time to spend. It's your life. Your life is made up of moments. You can really only be in one moment at a time. So what you're doing, in this present moment, in a very straightforward way, IS your life. Because this moment is all we really have for sure, all we can really experience, all we can really use, all we can really live in.

Pick One Thing: Time
Is it too simplistic, or idealistic, to say live in the now; be in the present? It brings a little greeting card verse to mind, doesn't it? Something along the lines of the past being gone and the future being uncertain, so we should appreciate the present...that's why they call it a gift.

What about plan for tomorrow as though you'll live a very long time, live for today as though it's your last? Oh, c'mon! I mean, that's impossible. Who suggests such things?

These are all cliche thoughts, I suppose, and that won't do because I'm trying to get at the truthful, juicy nugget inside this One Thing, Time. I want to be able to see time as something useful to my sense of owning my life and of feeling good about it. Not time as something too fluid to ever grab hold of, and too momentary to ever mold into something long term and worthwhile.

So I ponder (for a moment).

I want to be IN my time. I want to BE in my time. I want to be in MY time.

And it occurs to me. I am in. I can be. It is mine.

Here's how. I (egads, it's true!) take this moment as a gift. Anytime I want to. And I open it up to what I wish to do with it, how I want to feel about it, who I want to be in it... I become:

MASTER OF MY TIME
If I want to use this time to plan for the future, fine. As long as I feel good about it.

If I want to do some general thinking and writing about my time, terrific. Good idea. Do it.

If I want to finish my bookkeeping to-do list but this particular piece of time doesn't offer me enough leeway to do that job the way I know I need it to be done, well, it's okay. I use this moment to schedule that job for Friday, and I write my blog instead.

Ooh. I feel the power surge already. Some reading I've been doing about the idea of time shifting--consciously changing my attitudes and habits regarding my time--is really sinking in now. I notice I'm writing in present tense, even. I like it. I pat myself on the back about it.

I review the quote by the author of the book I plan on reading before the end of the year (it's on my list but there's still two ahead of it...one book at a time, Faith). Time Shifting author Stephan Rechtschaffen has my typical time anxiety pegged: "Most of the stress that people feel in any area of their lives is rooted in the feeling of not having enough time."

Dwelling in the present, I see there is always plenty of time....because I'm always here, ready to do my bidding! I accept the fear that I won't get everything I feel I need to get done. What the heck else is new? But I suddenly see, I always have that same potential. I always have a list--I'm alive, for petessake, there's going to be stuff to do!

But the rhythms of my moments, the patterns of how I string them all together, their richness and their shine, their freedom...all up to me.

Ahhhh. It becomes clear. Most of what I have to do, in most moments, is not urgent, despite my assumptions to the contrary. I need to learn to shift gears, really. I can back up from the future into the now and/or move away from the past into the now, and really reclaim my time.

How I spend my day, my hour, my my Time, better be thoughtful, or enjoyable, or productive--somehow it ought to be Important to me. Because I'm trading the moments of my life for whatever I do with them.