Stop Telling Yourself You Don’t Have Enough Time
One day last month, I kept making myself stressed.
I'd been away for a wonderful weekend beach retreat and came back to a full diary and a short week followed by two-days of in-person training. All those chilled, beachy vibes must have stayed on the boat back to Bali 🤣
I realised that the story I was telling myself is that I don't have enough time this week. My to-do list felt like a Tolstoy novel and all my mind wanted to tell me is that there's no time.
Luckily, a dear friend of mine reminded me this morning of Gay Henrick's notion of Einstein Time from his book, The Big Leap. (It's a great book - I've previously shared about the Upper Limit Problem and my own recent experience of it.)
Rather than thinking that time is a concept "out there", that it's fixed and finite, Einstein Time is relative. An hour with your beloved feels like a minute; a minute on a hot stove feels like an hour.
For me, the more I rush and hurry and stress, the less time I have and the less careful I am with it.
As soon as I slow down and breathe, I stop feeling the pressure of time "out there" and I experience a sense of internal space.
When I create the time to centre myself and stop doing stressed out, suddenly I can see the wood for the trees again. I can prioritise and focus.
Funnily enough, as soon as slowed down, I started making progress on the to-do list, which wasn't so much War and Peace as a post-it note. My creative brain came back online. I even felt excited about what was coming up.
The "I don't have enough time" story is a dangerously seductive one. Perhaps if we spent a little more time slowing down and being in our bodies, we would realise that we have more authorship about our time than the story has us believe.
Less "what should I be doing?" and more "what could I do?" or even "what would I love to do?"
What about you - do you do Einstein or Newtonian time? Have you read Gay Hendrick's book "The Big Leap"? How is your relationship to time?
Slowing down amid the overwhelm and chaos can be easier said than done.
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