IT’S JANUARY OF FREAKING 2019.

I often think, ‘Wow, it’s [insert day, week, month, year] already!’ It’s almost like I put my head in the sand for a while, resurfaced for air and am surprised by how much time has passed. We mark time by numbers, but that’s not how life works. Life goes on regardless of what’s written on the calendar. The numbers give us a reference and helps us have a frame to work with, but that’s all it is. Nothing about the calendar or time limits us in anyway. A calendar, just a bunch of lines and numbers on paper. Time, a counter on your phone or watch and if you think about it, a counter to what?

We would all come up with a different answer for that, but everyone applies the same two words to time: fast or slow. And usually it’s ‘too’ fast or ‘too’ slow. When we are young we want it to hurry up and when we’re older we want it to slow down. You almost never hear anyone say, ‘Ah, it’s just right’.

When is time ever ‘just right’?

I’ve lived in a big city my whole life. I was born in a big city, I grew up in a big city, I worked in The City. I pretty much had The City experience. Everything lived and died within a four block radius – time was never just right. It was defined by deadlines, meetings and ‘When will this be finished by?’ or ‘Why hasn’t this been done yet?’ or my favourite, ‘Don’t you want to get married?’ Multiply this by the number of people that you hear saying this to you and suddenly life seems overwhelming, you’re always running out of time and, depending on who I’m talking to, my eggs have dried up.

Time. What we measure everything in life by.

Out of curiosity I googled the most asked questions on, well, Google. This is the top 5 in the world according to www.mondovo.com:

1. What’s my IP address (surprising, but understandable in this day and age)
2. What time is it (see comments below)
3. How to register to vote (both hopeful and concerning)
4. How to tie a tie (completely practical)
5. Can you run it? (… huh?)

I find #2 to be particularly interesting. Mondovo does list most related searches to ‘what time is it’ and often it’s someone searching for the time in another city or country. Still. ‘What time is it’ is still above all that. I’ve certainly contributed to that list as I meet different people from different cities and expecting a reply back when there’s an 18 hour time difference is unrealistic. But ‘what time is it’ itself is really interesting. And I can only answer it for myself (although I bet some of you are thinking, ‘It’s time to get a watch’. It’s true, itsn’t it?)

I think it’s time to stop thinking as time as a way to measure ourselves and our goals. We often ask children, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ If Google could measure it, it would probably make the top 5 questions asked of children and youth among other questions such as ‘Did you wash your hands?’ And ‘Was that you or your brother/sister/cousin/friend/dog/gerbil?’ When we start to think about that question seriously we naturally set a time: ‘I’d want to be a manager/director/CEO by the time I’m 35’; ‘I want to be a millionaire by the time I graduate’; ‘I’d like to be married and start a family by the time I’m 30’. (Ever read the articles on the ‘Top 30 under 30’? Hands up if it sometimes makes you feel just a liiiiiittle bit… blah or [insert your own blah word here].) Don’t get me wrong. Setting goals are amazing and necessary even. Giving it a time frame can fuel us and motivate us, but only when time is treated as such. More often the time we set becomes a comparison and a measuring stick. It leaves us feeling defeated or like a failure and we’re certainly not as good as ‘so-and-so who did it before I did’. Time is then always against us, we’re always running out of it and time passes too fast or too slow.

So when is time ‘just right’?

I can only recall the most recent experience of this in the past year. I felt it twice. The first was almost exactly a year ago. I decided to live in Melbourne with my cousin for 4 months. In those 4 months I took 3 weeks to go to New Zealand and you’d think that with the amount of time I had in Melbourne that I would’ve planned my trip, but no. Time and I had a platform on which we would often meet called Procrastinate and that platform is a little bit like Platform 9 3/4 except I’d fall through the wall without realizing it and emerge a whole school year later having accomplished nothing. Well, I did do something in the end. It is New Zealand after all. I had a list of must-see places, booked a campervan, packed a backpack and my camera gear and off I went. Each day I would drive 4-6 hours from Point A to Point B accounting for the fact that I’d stop often for photos. I fully expected the normal feeling I get on vacations: that time would fly by and on the last day I would be sad and reluctant to leave. But neither of those things happened. I could pack a day full of activities and I’d get it all done without me thinking, ‘Wow, it’s time for bed already?’ I could leave it completely open and sit by a stream for 2 hours and not think, ‘What next?’ Time came and went just the same with each day passing the same way.

The second time I felt time as just time was right after I moved to my new place. It’s quieter here, I live in the suburbs, the mountains are an hour away, the sun shines into my room every morning and the skies stretch forever over the rooftops. I found and still find myself looking at the clock and thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve still got time’, and reflecting on these two experiences the last couple of weeks I realized two things. Aside from the obvious affects my environment has on me and one of the top reasons why I chose to move here, I:

1. Let go of the timelines and deadlines. I realize that I have the luxury of this now that I work for myself, but even more that would bring anxiety and overwhelm when I felt like I wasn’t building my business fast enough or learning what it takes to be a photographer quick enough. Even when in my past jobs the overwhelm was self-imposed. No one puts more pressure on completing things by the deadline than I did on myself. Now I set a timeframe but I don’t allow it to constrain me, or to determine the speed in which I learn and work, or make me feel like I’m behind the game and missing out on things. The focus isn’t the deadline, the focus is on the work.
2. Take it one day at a time. I have a general schedule – I do have things scheduled on each day for meetings and appointments – but overall, it’s fluid and as long as the most important things are done by the end of the week, I don’t sweat it. I also only schedule one major thing to concentrate on. I always have a few projects going on at any given time and I always feel like I don’t do enough. But now I’ll allow myself the whole day to do that one thing and that one thing well with my all of my attention.

Of course, I still have deadlines that are not my own, things crop up last minute and sometimes I’m just plain ol’ stuck with what I’m doing. But it’s manageable and time stops being a surprise or even an enemy and we’ve, so far, stopped meeting on the platform-that-shall-not-be-named.

Well, maybe for an afternoon here or there for a cup of tea. 🙃