Time…

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. About how, as we get older, time seems to move faster and faster, and how it’s such a common feeling there have been songs and books and all other manner of art created about it. I was on a school schedule (essentially nine months on, three months off) for basically my whole life until about three years ago when I quit teaching the last time and started a job that doesn’t have a summer break. It’s been an adjustment. Something I still struggle with, to be honest. But one thing I’ve noticed since I quite teaching is that time moves differently for me now. I don’t have built in breaks (except a few days here and there), so I have to strategically curate my paid time off to ensure that I get time off for the things that are important to me. Don’t get me wrong–I know how lucky I am to get paid time off at all in this country. It’s just a very different feeling than knowing over a year in advance what days I’ll have off. I also don’t have any breaks that feel long enough to catch up with everything I put off when I’m feeling busy. Sadly, that means there are a lot of things that I just never get around to doing. I’m working on using my time more effectively to work on these things, and also working on trying to take advantage of the short breaks I do get often–since I only work 29 hours a week, I often end up with a three day weekend. And I feel like I sometimes get more done in three days now than I used to get done in a week (or more).

Time has even started moving differently for me since the beginning of the pandemic. It used to feel like it was always just slipping away, without me noticing where it all was going. And then I would have these chunks of time off of work to think about it–time which also seemed to slip away. I’ve always been a natural night owl, so staying up late and getting up late in the summer would always become my default. But since I work through the summer now, and especially since I have a dog to take care of now who has something called Bilious Vomiting Syndrome (which means she barfs up bile if her stomach gets too empty), I have to be up fairly early pretty much every day to feed her and take her out. I’ve always said, “I like being up early, but I don’t like getting up early, and that’s never been more true than during the pandemic. I love being up and able to get a run in and various other things every morning, but oof–it’s hard for me to get to bed at a decent time so I can get up nice and early, feeling refreshed after a full night’s rest. And because I don’t sleep half the morning away on my days off, the days don’t go by so fast. And since the days don’t seem to fly by, and I’m not as busy as usual, I feel like I get so much more accomplished than I used to on days off.

As a result of both of those things, time seems to have slowed down for me the last several months. The days seem to have slowed, at least. Gretchen Rubin, author of one of the first “self-help” books I ever read, always says, “The days are long, but the years are short“. Especially now, I think that really applies for me, because even though many of my days feel slower than they used to, I already kind of think of 2020 as the “lost year” because it seems like just a week or two ago that we closed the place I work to the public because this strange pandemic was creeping into our community for the fist time. Even though 2020 is a year that brought tragedy for thousands, I’m grateful that, for whatever reason, I’m able to look at time a little differently than I have before. I’m making a conscious effort to slow down and look around so my whole life doesn’t pass by without me noticing.

Years ago, I got a gift from my brother and sister-in-law. It’s a print by an artist from Iowa that says, “Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.” For some reason, no matter how true I know that is, I have to constantly remind myself that, although I often feel like there isn’t enough time to do what I want to do, it’s really a matter of priorities. I waste a lot of time on silly, useless things like scrolling on Facebook, for example, when I could be using that time to work towards achieving my goals. At the same time, something I’ve gotten a lot better at in the last few years is giving myself grace. If I don’t always hit the mark I want to in my goals, I’m able to forgive myself and move on instead of wasting even more time beating myself up about it. I’m already carving out time each day to run and to write, and I intend to continue finding ways to use my time and live my life intentionally. But I also plan to allow myself time now and then to relax and not always be working on a goal, because that’s important sometimes too. So remember, the days are long but the years are short, and there’s always exactly enough time for the important things.