Time May Fly, But You’re The Pilot

photo by author

There are many relationships that we think about, work on, have feelings about, and try to change. Our relationship with our friends, family, partner, kids, parents, boss, coworkers, and even ourselves are often relationships that we think about, agonize over, and work to improve.

However, it is often our relationships with non-material things that we don’t think about but have a tremendous effect on us and drive us in ways that are both profound and unconscious. This would include our relationship with things like money, sex, food, drugs (including alcohol), work, safety/security, and time. How we relate to these things has a tremendous effect on how we behave, the choices we make, and how we feel, and yet so often those relationships are not conscious nor relationships that we actively shape.

Our relationship with time is one of the most important relationships we have. How we use our time is how we spend each of our days. It’s how we spend our life. And yet, most of us have a fairly adversarial relationship to time. There is never enough time, we often feel behind and that it goes too fast, and we often feel we run out of it. Or the opposite can be true — time crawls by far too slowly and we feel we are wasting it. In short, for most of us, our relationship with time is not conscious and healthy — it feels as if time is in control of us (vs vice versa) and…