The Illusion of "My Time"
I never feel like I have enough time.
This feeling makes me angry and annoyed. Throughout my life, I've taken that anger out on myself and others. I've been short tempered with my friends, family, and girlfriend when I feel like my time is being encroached upon.
Whenever time feels like a constraint, it's my needs that get the highest priority.
This morning was the perfect example. I knew I had to meditate for 60 minutes. I knew that if I didn't, my best friend would hold me accountable. I knew that after meditating, I had also committed myself to journaling and writing this post. On top that, I still needed to get some work done for my startup that I had put off yesterday, out of laziness. I also committed to spending time with my girlfriend this afternoon.
Before sitting down to meditate at 9AM, I felt like I was ready to boil over.
There wasn't enough time.
60 minutes to meditate? That's an absurd amount of time. Journaling, plus writing this post, would take at least another half hour. And on top of all that I still needed to make new ads for my company, fiddle with pricing, and pick my girlfriend up from the train station later.
Oh, and I wanted to read for a half hour.
The day felt ruined. But then, I sat down to meditate anyway. I had to start somewhere, as annoyed as I was. I couldn't deal with the thought of telling my best friend and de-facto accountability partner that I skipped just the second day of our 60 day meditation challenge.
The session started out easier than I thought, but I struggled around the 40 minute mark.
My mind started racing with all the things I needed to get done. Again, I felt like there wasn't enough time. But then, something interesting happened.
I checked my phone, which was running the meditation timer.
I only had 20 minutes left to go, and it was 9:40AM. I've meditated for 20 minutes straight before, and 9:40AM is still quite early, I told myself. What was I getting so worked up about?
All I had to do was get through the next 20 minutes. After that, if I just stayed steadfast to the tasks at hand, I could have everything done that I wanted to get done well before noon. I didn't have to pick my girlfriend up until 1:30PM, so I'd even have a couple hours to spare.
As my meditation session wrapped up, I realized that my sense of time, and how long things take to accomplish, was totally off.
The tasks I took to be an almost offensive encroachment on "my time" amounted to no more than 2 hours of my day. And these weren't tasks that had been imposed on me by some outside force out of my control–these were tasks I chose, things that I was doing because they would make me a better friend, boyfriend, brother, son, and contributor to society.
So, why was I so annoyed in the first place? Why has my experience of time and obligation so off kilter for most of my life? I'm not sure.
Maybe it's my type A personality or something that happened to me years ago that I've since put out of my memory. Or maybe I'm just getting older and feeling like I'm running out of time. But whatever it is, I realize now more than ever that it's an illusion.
I have enough time.
In fact, I have plenty of it, as long as I stay focused.
And maybe that's what's at the root of all of this. Distraction has whittled away my time so much, for so long, that some part of me has since gone on the defensive. Like an immune system in overdrive, some part of me now guards my time without discretion for who or what is trying to take it.
It's only day 2 of this 60 day meditation challenge, but it has already yielded a major insight.
Reclaiming my focus means recalibrating what time means to me. It means reorienting my relationship with time and attention, so I can allow myself to spend these two finite resources lavishly on the things that actually matter, while being frugal, or even downright stingy, on the things that don't
Until tomorrow,
James