Gift Yourself Time: the ultimate path to a peaceful relationship with yourself and others

What Even is Time?

It feels like I have a lot of lessons in me at the moment—maybe it’s the phase of refection at the end of the year, maybe it’s just what I’m seeing in my own experience. Who knows.

One of the things that has been a barrier to me creating a truly peaceful relationship with myself, and with others, is the impatience I’ve felt when things don’t move to my timescale.

I’ve seen it more clearly in hindsight. Sometimes, of course, we know our impatience isn’t justified, but sometimes I’ve only seen it in hindsight, because, at the time, it felt like a failing or a problem in someone else. That if only they would… then… (something better or an avoidance of something terrible.)

I strongly suspect I am not alone in occasionally thinking,

For goodness sake, why don’t they get it / do it?!

The angry commuter, the impatient boss, the over-bearing parent… if we haven’t been that person then we’ve definitely observed them.

What we don’t always see are the less comedic and more insidious places that shows up for us. What we don’t see is that our effort to maintain a calmness, an even-temper, our exaggerated patience in ‘explaining’ to someone why they need to do the thing we ant and why it’s so important they they do it now, is that life is playing games with us.

It looks important because it looks important—and we have forgotten, or don’t realise, that life works to its own timescale.

And the difference between the timescale that life is running to and the one we believe is important is the root of all the frustration and anger we are experiencing. Even when we don’t realise it.

It’s a Cosmic Joke

This might be stretching the metaphor too far because I, personally, don’t believe there is intentionality in the way life rolls itself out, but it definitely feels true that we are being laughed at, we are being toyed with and, that even the very notion of time is a huge joke at our expense. It’s yet another thing we have made-up about life.

I don’t mean that we have ‘made-up’ that we circle the sun, that the days come and go, the seasons change, and that we, as do all organic bodies, will age and eventually die.

I mean that we have ‘made-up’ the idea that something has to be done or be changed by a certain point in the ever-flowing chronological movement.

Not just that it ‘has to’, but—and here’s the crux—that we are not OK unless it changes within the register of hours and seconds we have mapped out.

Imagine this,

If we knew our children would always get enough sleep, would any parent ever become irritated and impatient?

If it didn’t matter that we had to complete the performance evaluation by Friday, and that our staff would be doing better by this time next year, and that everything was OK even if they weren’t, would we be more patient with our staff?

If we knew the annoying colleague was struggling with loneliness, and that a gentle work might occasionally land on a receptive ear, might we feel differently towards him than giving him a label of ‘toxic’, and avoiding sitting with him in he canteen?

If we knew that our friend would stop punishing her body with food, alcohol, drugs, or too much exercise in her own time, and that the root to helping her was through love not anger, would we feel more compassion towards her for her suffering, and might we let go of the ‘I know best’ words that are triggered when we think we do know best.

And yes, I too could argue against those statements.

That it does matter, that I do want to ‘protect’ my friend, that we are in work and being paid to meet certain objectives, and, and…

What if it was my attachment to a certain change, or a certain timescale that was creating that impatience?

We all hang on to our own timescale, whether we realise it or not; that X should happen by Y, or there will be Z consequence. But how often do we challenge where these ideas come from? And what would happen if we were to loosen our grip on on some of the more sticky ones?

What’s it All For?

And then there is this,

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

― Gabriel García Márquez

If it really is enough, then shouldn’t we suspend all our desires around time?

What I’ve seen for myself over home, work and other relationships is that we always have much longer than we think to effect change. Or, more accurately, that we have longer than we think to observe the way things change whether we meddle in them or not.

Watching my children grow up, and working with clients and staff over years, I can see how things change, how we can tweak and point, but how there is usually much less for us to do than we think, and that holding onto any notion of an expected deadline is significantly more damaging than doing nothing at all.

If Time Doesn’t Exist…

What I’ve seen for myself is that the timescale I am imagining to be important is something that only exists in the story I’m seeing as true in this moment. There is no real time. In fact most of what looks important to me isn’t, it only looks that way because it looks that way.

If it looks true to me that the tree should grow from its seed in six months rather than six years then I’ll become frustrated if it doesn’t.

And even if I could force my timescale, why would I want to? What’s so much better about the forced growth than the natural rate of change (although rhubarb lovers will take issue with me here ;-)). Even where we can bend nature, why would we want to?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t; rather that some of our motives are not as clean as we think they are, and we should be careful about where we’re creating justifications to appease our own insecurities, rather than a shared positive experience.

When I see the illusory nature of what I think to be true, and what I think to be important, for myself and others, even though I know there is only myself in this scenario, I see that I don’t need to act the way I thought I had to act, say the things that felt important to be said.

I can pause and look again. I can step into what Garcia Marquez is describing because, of course, he’s talking about love.

It’s For This…

He’s talking about the deepest feeling of connection that can exist between two people, that moment when two become one—not in a physical sense, although that’s one expression of it, but in the sense that we know each other, we see each other, and we recognise and identify with something shared and the same in each of us.

We are able to drop judgement, expectations, feelings of anger and frustration, we often find compassion rises up, and we drop out of whatever had looked true the moment before, and we find ourselves with a ‘new page’, a sense of ‘OK-ness’ and a sense that nothing matters beyond this moment.

And then, typically, we snap out of it. We get back to ‘real life’.

I’ve seen, though, that the moment of connection is the only thing that really matters. I find myself questioning, again and again everything that is in the way of a feeling love towards the person in front of me.

What if that feeling of love and connection is at the end of the rainbow our busy minds are creating us? If that’s true then I need not take the tortuous and painful journey of trying to change someone. I can direct them and still enjoy watching and sharing the journey they choose to take for themselves.

What if letting go of my own expectations is the thing that will free me to take a different action? Something that isn’t time-bound? Something that feels freeing, and fun?

I don’t mean I ‘convince myself’ to let go of my impatient feelings—they’re still there sometimes—I just don’t pay them as much attention as I used to. My idea about deadlines, when they do exist, are more like an annoying builder’s drill in the neighbour’s yard than anything that is relevant to the exchange that’s happening right now.

If we loosened that pressure of ‘time’ we’re placing upon ourselves? What then?

Might we find that some of those things we’re striving for actually get easier? Or become redundant as we see that we don’t need them anyway, or that ‘life’ takes care of them in her own time.

It’s certainly true for me and I wonder, if more of us removed the timescales we’ve imagined are important, we’d be able to spend more time in the place we think we’re heading for?

if you’ve read this far then may it’s something for you to reflect on and explore for yourself, alongside (or dare I say instead of!) whatever resolutions, goals, and intentions you’re setting for yourself in the new year…

With love,

Cathy