Making Peace With Time

Are you in a losing battle with time? Do you have too much to do and not enough time to do it? Are you always running late or just making it under the wire without a moment to spare?

The time issue is a struggle for many. Rather than criticizing yourself or blaming your responsibilities for your troubles, let's stop and take a look at what makes up a time commitment.

Let’s say that you have a demanding job with many responsibilities. You make a commitment to take a class on Wednesday evenings after work. The class starts at 7:00PM and for the first two weeks you make it just on time. You notice a few people coming in a bit late and nothing embarrassing or eventful happens as a result.

The next week you are preparing to leave your office and your phone starts ringing. You pick it up and find yourself in a complicated interaction that takes thirty minutes to resolve.

Now you are running late. Traffic is unusually heavy. You find yourself stopped at every red light. The tension is building. You arrive at your class fifteen minutes late. You are unnerved and frazzled so it takes you another twenty minutes to settle down.

A new project comes up at work the next day that requires your attention. The project manager wants to discuss the plan in depth over dinner and only has Wednesday evenings available. You are already committed to your class, however, you say yes to the dinner meeting slated for next Wednesday, because you do not want to appear less than committed to the success of the new project.

Your evening class is now disrupted, you will miss too much to make up, and therefore, you have one more broken commitment to yourself to add to all the other similar situations from your past. You come to the Wednesday evening project meeting foggy, confused and low energy because a part of you is still attached to the class you started and will not be finishing.

What is happening here? How can time binds be avoided or minimized in the future?

First, let's look at what a time commitment means. When you make an agreement to show up somewhere in the future, it is no less than a grand leap of faith. You have no guarantee that you will be alive on that date and time, yet, you are willing to hold that place in your imagined future, open and empty, to be filled by the event you have chosen. You pre-commit your energy to a selected future date and time.

When you make commitments and don’t keep them, you squander the energetic investment that you made by making the commitment, and close the door to any new avenues that would have been opened to you by keeping your commitment. Therefore, making commitments and then breaking them is counter-productive to thriving.

On the other hand, when you over-commit yourself, you freeze your life into predictable blocks of pre-planned events, with no breathing room in-between for any surprises or intrigue. An over-committed life is about as stimulating, appetizing and nourishing as a prepackaged frozen dinner. It does not require anything real from you and it is fast, convenient and takes no thought.

Therefore, making too many commitments that keep you frantically active, sets you up to have a life that is like the gerbil running on the wheel in his cage.

Does this mean that making commitments should be avoided if you want a full, rich life? Not at all. As a matter of fact, your ability to make and keep commitments to yourself and others is one of the major cornerstones of high self-esteem and self-trust.

The challenge is to become more respectful and honorable in your relationship with time. The way to accomplish this is to establish an intimate relationship with time by treating each commitment you enter into with yourself and others as a sacred trust.

Sacred means hallowed, holy, consecrated, divine, dedicated and devoted. Trust is defined as confidence, reliance, faith, hope, expectation, belief, assured, anticipation, entrust, commit and confide.

I can hear you now. "Sacred Trust? Who are you kidding? I am an accountant, executive, mother, artist, fill in the blank, not Mother Theresa or Gandhi. My life is demanding, but in no way is it grandiose."

Exactly. We do not see ourselves, our lives, and our energy as sacred. What would happen if we did?

In order to approach our lives and our commitments to life as sacred, it is necessary to acknowledge that we are more than just pounds of flesh dragged around by an overactive brain.

We are spiritual, mental, emotional and physical beings. When we spiritualize our lives we elevate, refine and become supersensible. A quick way to say it is, we begin to live our lives with clear intent.

Imagine if you turned the light of clear intention on every commitment you presently have. What if you began to ask the hard questions?

What am I doing involved in this? Why am I investing my sacred energy here? Where do I need to pull my sacred energy back home? Is this behavior aligned with my highest and best? What am I really about? What do I stand for? What am I avoiding by staying so overdrawn? What is right action at this time in my life?

When we wholly commit to respecting our energy and our time as sacred, we naturally move into a process of re-arranging our commitments to include a deeper involvement and investment in the quality of our lives.

Living an intentional life requires that we learn to become sensitive to the inner whisperings of our intuitive wisdom that longs to guide us towards choices that yield an abundance of nourishing and fulfilling moments strung together to create a full, rich, rewarding life.