by Fdecomite
Time has always been an issue with me.
I don’t feel the passage of time. I didn’t know that for a long time, because of course, I can’t see what I don’t have.
On the other hand, I can park my car in a strange city, walk to a building, go up the elevator, snake my way to an office and when my host ask where I parked I can go to the window and point to my car. I am fully oriented in space – but time? Not so much.
I don’t have a sense of how long things will take. This drives my husband crazy. He wants to know when I will be ready to leave. I arbitrarily throw a number out there and when I’m not ready at that time, he can’t understand why not.
The answer is that I know what I need to do to get ready to leave, but I have no concept of how long each of the tasks will take. I am fully in the moment. To me all time is now. I don’t know how long it takes me to get dressed, or put on my makeup, or write a blog post, for that matter. And even if I did, it’s not always the same. Sometimes I try on a couple of things, some outfits take more fiddling than others; some blog posts are easier to write. Without a feeling of the passage of time, it wouldn’t matter anyway, since I can’t tell how I am doing compared to other times.
This causes me to be late often, much to the annoyance of my ever-on-time husband. Most people accept that is my way. I’m not usually very late and I’m sometimes early. It’s not because I am careless with the feelings of others or don’t respect them. It is simply that as I set out, I’m making an uneducated guess as to how long it will take me to finish what I am doing, make my way there and, often (being a mother of 4, a business owner and the Chair of a charity), I toss in a few errands on the way, this being a necessity.
Being fully in the moment has its rewards. When you have my attention, you have it all. I am fully engaged with what I am doing in the moment. I can concentrate deeply on what is in front of me. I think it explains how I can do all that I do. I can multi-task with the best of them, but really, I’m a single-tasking kinda gal.
So, me and time, we just ignore each other. I write lists of what to do next without any idea of how long each item will take. I just work on them, one at a time until they are done.
