Finding Time

I’ve learned, in my mid-adult years, that my brain resists habit and routine. I also struggle mightily to run on clock time. I don’t know why. I suspect I’ve always been scattered and am just now noticing how I’ve adapted to compensate for it. (Read: Many projects, always in motion, circling back and again to finish things.) 

This focus-scuttling tendency naturally protects me from forming (some) bad habits, but it also raises the bar on forming good ones, like, locking all the doors in my home, every night. Or, establishing a rock-solid routine for self-care, whether it’s kale smoothies or Pilates or mindfulness practice. 

At this point, though, I want to be mindful. I want to slip into the stream of time and attention like every other productive person and not flail and dog-paddle back to my own swirling eddy. So, what can be done? 

The answer, research explains, lies in how I approach what I desire. One broad survey of how emotions alter our perception of time suggests that merely feeling content about a worthy goal (practicing mindfulness every day) isn’t enough to make time “fly” as it does when I'm truly having fun (which is more desirable, naturally). 

To sense time as passing quickly, more effortlessly, I should anticipate actually achieving the goal/reward/habit/routine, according to researchers at the University of Alabama. This approach motivation “narrows our memory and attention processes, helping us shut out irrelevant thoughts and feelings.”  

On the other hand, studies warn, negative emotions such as sense of threat or fear can make time feel like it’s standing still. No wonder our brains spin out into galaxies of worry when we give in to rumination, resentments, and what-ifs. 

OK, onward.  

I’m drawn to the belief that awe-worthy things already abound in our natural world, every day, and my only task is to find a few, to slow down and take notice. Science supports this. Awe causes people to feel more “in the moment,” studies suggest, and leads us to sense time as more abundant, expansive, less linear, especially when the inspiration derives directly from nature. 

My idea of regular mindfulness practice, then, needs this wildness, a little allowance for wonder and the occasional creative tangent, in order for me to truly desire it, as opposed to feeling it’s something I have to do.

Moment by moment, I’m shedding the burden of “making” time to more easily find the time that’s been there all along.