What is time?

a constant battle between enjoying and optimizing it

Today’s return is unceremonious, so I may as well be super frank.

My therapist recently told me three words that made me bawl my eyes out:

“You’re not late.”

I had gone in there chipper, pen to journal, ready to absorb whatever sage bangers she’d drop. Instead, I used up half her tissue box on unforeseen waterworks because I felt that verbal hug so deeply in my bones, a release to just be tired and human instead of constantly chasing what’s next.

I’d been telling her how I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. How it’s equally endless and finite, how I’m always trying to both enjoy and optimize it. That ~*YOU HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF HOURS IN A DAY AS BEYONCE*~ quote all over Tumblr in the 2010s must have f*cked me up because for better or worse, I’m always thinking about goal posts, hacks, using this thirty minutes to write, timeblocking that hour to get through a high-focus work task, or finding the right-sized podcast episode to accompany me on a 10 minute walk with my dog — all in service of getting the most out of my days so I’m not “wasting” them.

In her very kind GOAT way, she then asked me to reframe how I view the concept of wasting time.

It so happened that something had also recently triggered me on the internet’s hellhole LinkedIn. Because algorithms are random, my feed was hit with a post from a perfectly optimistic stranger reflecting on their two-year break from corporate tech life. They went on to list the many ways they made great use of their extended sabbatical: They started an exercise club! They volunteered at a community center and taught people how to use technology. They brushed up on a foreign language. They took up comedy. They traveled. It was, essentially, a noble laundry list justifying how this person’s time off had not hindered, but strengthened their value as a respectable, highly employable person.

That person’s next post? After two years off, they’d landed a job at one of the world’s biggest companies that would no doubt reward them with a hefty bag. Victory lap of rest complete, on to the next chapter.

My initial gut reaction was, good for this person!! My next reaction was to check myself. Why didn’t I do all that in my nearly two years off before returning to The Man? Did I rest wrong? Was I supposed to be doing something more wholesome, more valuable beyond chilling tfo? Did I hiatus improperly by filling my days with reading, writing and space?

And then I got mad. Not at this person……okay maybe a little but mostly at society, at how the breakneck culture of work has evolved to make people feel like we always need to be doing more, justifying our experiences and our value and our time, or else the market, our peers and the world will keep moving on without us.

Then I locked my phone and threw it across the room.

JK! I put it in my pocket and then went to see my therapist because we had an appointment.

Because as much as I fear I’m wasting time, mostly I wish it would just slow down. Like

• when my college nephew brings his laundry to my house for the weekend, and I used to do the same thing in college at his mom’s house before he was born.

• when I tell my husband we’ve been together for seven years and he’s like no, eight.

• when I get carded by the cashier at Trader Joe’s then later at work, a younger colleague compliments the “chic greys” in my hair (true story. I didn’t mind it. Aging is a blessing and I’ll own looking twentysomething with chic greys until I die.)

• when my spotify wrapped “listening age” is 24 because I keep writing to playlists that put me in a YA state of mind, and 24 was soooo not recent

• when I see my friends’ kids growing up in pics, or watch my darling parents creeping on 70 despite being forever 45 in my mind.

• when I realize Friends With Benefits came out in 2011. WHAT THE HELL

  

When I was younger, I leaped before looking all the time. I thought life would get less complicated as I aged because having less time meant that eventually, less things would matter. In many ways that’s true, but the years have also added more complexities and memories, more challenges, more seasons of emotion to reflect on.

Three-plus decades have piled up on me already but one feeling that’s heightened is this tiny question perma-lodged between my ribs asking whether there’s still more more more I could be doing. Sometime after my twenties, time became this thing I started trying to control, moving faster than I can catch it, but maybe the point isn’t to sprint harder but to soften into it and let it take me places I can’t yet see.

However much time I’m lucky to get, I can choose to believe it will still surprise me when I least expect it, and ultimately keep being worth the wait.

And when I get to the next place it feels like taking me, I’m not late.

We’re not late.