Words: Clare Dwyer Hogg
Image: Barney Beech
I’ve written before about my relationship to time, and how I’m trying to adjust my approach to it. First off was the acknowledgement that my idea of timing doesn’t always correspond with the real seasons in my life. (Actually, make that virtually never.) Turns out, it helps trying not to rely on an imagined timeline as a real marker of success or failure. Hindsight showed me, too, that it was a boon things I thought should have happened at particular times, didn’t. I wouldn’t have been ready.
It seems that wasn’t the subject done and dusted, despite my attempts to think so. The realisation about fictional timelines versus actual seasons was quite big picture thinking. It was the horizon, the sky above my head. But if I’m committing to live well in the small details of life, then it was inevitable that I would have to figure out my approach to time in these as well.
In essence, I want to make the most of the time I have. No revolution there: that’s pretty much a basic human aspiration. But recently I have stepped back to look at what daily attitude I have unwittingly translated this feeling into. I’m not sure I’ve done very well in the translation.
It appears that I feel “making the most of my time” is about being absolutely productive in all the seconds I get. This is undoubtedly part personality trait, part where I find myself – wherever I step, I trip over things I need to do (often literally). The effect of this attitude is, broadly, either feeling either that enough hasn’t been achieved in the allotted time (afternoon, a day, years), or feeling guilty if there is “time out”.
I experience this guilt, despite believing fervently in creating space for quiet time (which I generally do). The feeling is therefore counterintuitive, but must run deep.
What source does all the tension come from? The feelings of not enough and need-to-do-more? A lot of people find themselves at this point, albeit from different routes
Equally, I have a tense gnawing in my stomach when I feel under pressure with time in a work sense – despite my real belief that, at the end of it, everything I achieve is worth nothing.
Really, worth nothing. Worth nothing if I haven’t done the other things well – forming good relationships, living in the best way I can, making a meaningful difference in small ways to other humans. Some of the things I’m thinking about here are as tiny as an atom split in two – small acts of kindnesses count, for instance, and I mean that resolutely, no hippy airy-fairy involved. I think of them as actions that are living – the human equivalent of nature sending out those seeds on little parachutes. It’s about planting into other people’s lives. Which in turn has an effect on me, and how I’m utilising the time in my life. Those are the things I hold to be worth something. Without them, everything else is meaningless.
Yes – pursuing what I know I am good at, following what I feel I should do in terms of career, working and creating the best I can: this is not meaningless. It’s important. But it must be in context. I cannot make it the evidence of my time spent well, otherwise it undermines what I know I believe to be the point of all this living.
What source does all the tension come from? The feelings of not enough and need-to-do-more? I think that a lot of people may find themselves at this point, albeit from different routes. I’ve come to appreciate that rather than the tension being uncomfortable in the good, growing, sense, it is a sign of an unhealthy attitude to what time is for me. At these moments, time becomes more like a claw around my organs, and less an open space of creativity. It appears that for me, on some level, the stakes are higher when it comes to my output. I can only think that this is because I am breaking one of my fundamental rules without even being aware of it – comparing myself to others.
It is interesting and strange that I didn’t realise this until I began to think about time, which seems like such an ethereal subject until you isolate your feelings about it.
I doubt this is the end of the story. But, so far, my understanding is this: the time I hold is not a sea-shell demanding to be filled with the whole of the sea. Rather, I hold the shell in my hand, filling it when I need to, and when I don’t, what I do with it is up to me. I can press it against my ear, toss it in the air, look at it, or not. I don’t want to waste what is in my possession. But then, I need to trust that I have no intention of flinging it over my shoulder and ditching it. Rather, I want to know that when I use my time to sit quietly, or get busy, whether I work or do not work, that I am not engulfed by a feeling that I have squandered it, gambled it away and come up with nothing. To determine to use it with purpose means that many achievements will be hidden, perhaps not due to bear fruit for decades to come, or to bear fruit in lives that are not mine, never for me to see.
Really, what I am grappling with is how to think about things with more equilibrium. That what I do unpaid is as worthy of time as what I do that is paid. The things I undertake with no visible result – a slower walk, offering help, watching the clouds through a top floor window, whatever – are valid too. Because this is my time. I want to fill it, not suffocate it – because that, in turn, will only suffocate me.
