3 Things I’ve learned about time

“The inexorable march of time”.

The quote above is one of my favourites, yet I’ve no idea to which genius I should attribute it. Some lunchtime web-searching has failed to yield the originator of the phrase; whilst I was unclear on the exact meaning, I’m unsurprised to learn that inexorable means ‘impossible to stop or prevent’ and so seems apt as an opener for this piece. Time marches on regardless of what we do, and we are powerless to stop or influence it. All we have is our own interpretation of it and our own perception of what time means to us.
With the birth of a new year I’ve been reflecting on the past and planning for the future, and below I summarise for you now a few key lessons that I treat as absolute and undeniable truths about time.

Time passes more quickly as you get older (even when you don’t want it to)

I recall hearing this one from my grandparents generation on many occasions as a child, and I’m sure it’s been offered to me often by my parents too when I’ve been guilty of wishing my life away. Many of us tend to look beyond where we are now in a bid to bring forth an event or a time in the future where we perceive that things will be in some way better; more enjoyable, less stressful or more fun. 

As I approach what is presumably fairly-labelled ‘middle-age’ with my 41st birthday looming I can confirm that the weeks, months and years truly do seem to be flying-by and with ever-increasing speed as I get older. It now seems that before the Christmas decorations have had a chance to gather dust in the attic, the evenings suddenly seem to be getting lighter, my hay-fever and pollen allergies kick in, and summer is looming. Just as I’m getting accustomed to wearing shorts every day, the leaves start falling from the trees and soon after, supermarkets start arranging flamboyant displays of tinsel, discounted brandy and mince-pies at the entrance; within a blink of the eye another Christmas is upon us.

Significant events in the lives of my kids seem to occur with growing velocity too and with the transition of daughter number 1 into high school still a raw and recent memory, she’s now learning to drive a car and only 18 months off either University or entering into the world as a fully-fledged tax-paying adult. “How can this be?” I ask myself and yet I know the answer; my predecessors had it right all along.

Each day seems to take just as long as it ever did, but the weeks and months pass by in a blur. I’m not yet willing to put this down to a failing memory and speculate instead that the many events that accompany raising kids, pursuing a career, seeking happiness, and supporting a family make time seem to pass by quicker and quicker. We simply haven’t the capacity to be mindful enough to acknowledge every part of every event of every day. Maybe I’m wrong and in any case the explanation is pretty academic; the fact is that time feels like it passes-by quicker and whilst I’m not prone to worrying about accelerating towards the final destination of life, it’s certainly a sobering thought.

The opposite can also be true if you choose to look at time at a more granular level. When we’re willing the hands on the clock to speed up, the opposite happens. Putting aside the physical realities that you cannot influence the passing of time, it feels like the more I wish for time to pass by faster (usually when I’ve lost sight of the need to maximise the value and benefit I take from every waking minute), the usual outcome is that it will seem to slow down.

What I’ve learned (from a relatively early age thanks in no small part to parents who wouldn’t tolerate hearing that I was bored, and who would be all too happy to find me a useful means of passing the time if I couldn’t do so for myself) is that it is far easier to distract oneself from the tedium by engaging in something useful, interesting or diverting rather than merely watching the metaphorical paint-dry.

When every second counts, it’s important that you don’t waste it by just counting the seconds.

Time is a healer (and an enabler for learning)

I’ve learned over time that no matter how difficult things may seem, it is always good (if nigh on impossible in the moment) to remember that in the future things won’t seem so bad. With the passing of time, almost everything can be seen through rose-tinted glasses. When looking back at events with the benefit of time, we usually see things with greater clarity than we could ever have mustered in the moment. Periods of great challenge, sadness and upset can be understood better, analysed more effectively and with greater clarity of thought and less-raw emotion, often allowing positive lessons extracted from the events. At the very least it helps us to process things a bit better.

No matter how hard things may seem right now, how little you may believe that you have a chance of coming out of the other side of it smiling (or even breathing), history has a useful means of reminding you that you will do, and furthermore you will marvel at the resilience you have continually demonstrated in the face of adversity.

It is only through being able to look back on things too, both in the immediate aftermath and also at later intervals that you can extract all the lessons from them, and this applies both to the positives as well as the negatives. I can remember many occasions when I’ve treated something as a victory, congratulated myself for a job well-done or for a decision I was convinced was well-made only later to wonder whether I had done the right thing, or if I could have handled it better. Similarly, with the passing of failed relationships it has sometimes taken me years to understand and acknowledge key learnings about myself or how I handled things since at the time all I could see was a need to extract myself from an undesirable situation, and feel relief when I got out.

No matter what happens in life, whether good or bad, the passing of time will continue to yield valuable lessons and insight, without being clouded by emotions that may be present in the moment. Once you realize and embrace this, it becomes a massive source of comfort, benefit and value.

Everything takes more time than you think it will (or want it to)

I pride myself on striving to be productive and make use of every waking moment to achieve things and deliver against the (meticulous) plans I tend to make for all but the most routine of tasks. Having returned to work from 2 week’s vacation over Christmas, I’ve been fortunate to enjoy some quality time with the family and friends and have overindulged to the extent that I was fearful of stepping on the bathroom scales (with due-cause as it turned out).

During that time I’ve completed a house-move, visited friends and relatives around the country and crammed in a number of days of quality ‘me-time’ as well. Whilst I’m glad to have done all these things and view each of them as positive activities and experiences in their own right, I’ve marvelled on several occasions that it’s never, ever possible to get as much done in one 24 hour period as I think it will be.

Consider the house move; I had three days allocated to this over the holidays, one ‘assisted’ by the kids, one with my brother in law to do the heavy-lifting and finally one on my own to box-up the final few bits and pieces, dump a healthy van-load of junk at the municipal tip, and to clean my rental-home in hopeful-anticipation of receiving my full damage deposit back from the landlord.

In each instance I started the day with a clear mental plan detailing how I intended the day to unfold; a list of tasks that would be completed, with an expectation of finishing quicker than planned. Quite why I carried this expectation is a mystery since in reality the converse couldn’t be truer.

My reality is that no matter how rigorous I may be in planning a task, more often than not there will be things that emerge to complicate. More likely I will simply have underestimated how long it would really take either based on optimism or naivety. The same has also been true when planning how much I could cram into a day of leisure; a day when I hoped to take a hike through the local countryside, take a nap, do some writing and clean my car ended up being dominated by the walk at the expense of the other things. This was no bad thing and I enjoyed the time immensely. I wonder though how much more I might have enjoyed it if in the back of my mind I didn’t have a little voice reminding me of all the other things that I had planned and which were going to be missed?

In my professional life I see repeatedly that projects usually, if not always take longer than planned to complete. This isn’t merely an indicator of professional incompetence or serial-optimism but rather a reality of life; no matter how much we may plan, forecast and anticipate delays, the reality is usually that a job done properly will take longer than planned. We specialise in Agile delivery (a methodology that is designed to deliver quick results at regular intervals) and yet even this structured approach can be subject to delaying factors, more often than not seeing delays, or at least less delivered on time than was originally planned.

This law doesn’t seem to just apply at a task level either; it pervades virtually every aspect of my life.

Building a career, improving my golf-swing, writing books, recovering from divorce, falling in love and finding my life-partner (and understanding what this really means), seeing returns on my investments, developing my business, gaining maturity as a parent, developing insight into how my kids think, becoming more proficient and competent professionally, improving my physical fitness, learning how to relate-to and influence different types of people, learning how to roast a turkey, becoming proficient with a power-drill, building an understanding of what dietary habits work for me; each of these diverse examples has taken me time to do, and far more time than I had ever expected or hoped they would at the outset.

I was always an impatient child and I see now that this trait has not completely gone away in adulthood. If it had, I wouldn’t still be finding myself running out of time when trying to complete a task, or leaving work having accomplished a fraction of what I planned to over my morning coffee. What has changed as I’ve aged is that I believe I’ve become more realistic, more laissez-faire and more patient as a whole. I’m as optimistic as I ever was about what could be achieved but I now temper this with realism as to how long I am prepared to give a task before I see results.

These days I still aim for the ultimate goal, but I’m also prepared to accept that it will take time and with the benefit of the aforementioned hindsight I can expect and enjoy lots of mini-goals along the way.

That is surely the blessing of growing older, and certainly one thing that I’m incredibly grateful for in realising with the passing of time; in the past I would have taken it as a failing and something that I sought to correct (or complain about) if I didn’t get what I wanted, when I wanted it.

Nowadays, I acknowledge the fact that along the way there have been, or will be micro-achievements that I can celebrate and the major-achievements will follow provided I’m patient and grateful for what has already gone by.

My challenge now is in making sure I remember this when another deadline slips, and secondly, to instil this in my kids when they expect tomorrow’s results today.

Toby Hazlewood - Divorced Lifestyle Design