Marking time

Every Saturday morning, I have a set meeting with a friend and coaching colleague. We check in with each other and do coaching on areas where we need some inner guidance or structure. And we do a lot of chatting and laughing too! (Without a doubt, good friends who you can laugh with is an ingredient in a good life for me!)

Our check-in question has become "How many weeks did you live this week?" A tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging that life has felt more full, compact, and fast. From what I hear from most of my friends, I am not alone when I say "I feel like I lived 2 weeks this week!" 

This sense of time being wonky might also show up in phrases like

• "How is it only Tuesday!?"
• "It's Friday already!?"
• "How is it already time to stop work and cook dinner?"
• "How many days ago was that?"

I could blame this on the pandemic and all the disruption it has caused, but I have to be honest and say that life felt that way before March 2020. It has gotten worse thanks to the 'Rona but I would be fooling myself if I thought everything will magically get better when we are past quarantine phase if I do nothing different. And I love magic so I am always rooting for it! 🦄

Why is this happening?

Part of it is just age. Time appears to pass more quickly as we get older. A year to a 5 year old is 20% of their life, so it's a lot. One year to a 50 year old is a mere 2% of their life. Children also remember things differently than adults.¹  I have my Stitcher app (an app for listening to podcasts) set to play everything at 1.25x speed so I listen to a full podcast in 80% of the time. It's sort of like that for how we experience life compared to kids. 

Being on quarantine has not helped. We are not creating as many memories so we don't have a good sense of time perception.  It has been a full year and a half since my friend Tracy and I have seen Rob Thomas play live! I'm having my second quarantine birthday this weekend. All the concerts, Broadway musicals, lunches with friends. None of those memories have happened.

So what can we do?

If you are also feeling this way, there are things we can do to help us experience time differently. 

Here are a few.

1. Establish ways to mark time

One of the things I've heard people say they miss the most have been family gatherings at holidays. The holidays help us mark time. Performing rituals, repeating the traditions, holding events on special days. All these things help us mark time. 

Here are a few ways that you might mark time. Pick ones you like and leave the rest.

• Have a ceremony each full moon. You can find a ton of them online. You don't have to have a bunch of crystals and candles. It might just be time moon bathing every month, reflecting over the past month, and setting intentions for the upcoming month. All you need is the moon and a journal. 
• Take a day of the week or month to be a Sabbath—a day you rest, maybe you spend it alone, maybe you turn off all internet that day. Make it a special, quiet day.
• Celebrate the seasons by changing the decor of a room, setting up an altar for each season, or change the background images on your desktop to ones for the season. I can't wait for pastel bunnies and eggs when spring starts!
• Set aside a time every week that you do something that fills your heart—a conversation with someone special, writing a thank you letter to a friend, watching your favorite show by yourself in your bunny slippers with a big mug of hot tea. 

Whatever you decide to do, set it on your calendar. Prepare for it and be a little possessive of that time. Activities become rituals when we commit to repeating them. Every tradition you have started sometime.

2. Anticipate something

The things I typically looked forward to are existing somewhere out in the Land Far Far Away. I'll probably get to go on my 50th birthday trip (that was scheduled for May 2020) in May 2022. But I don't even know that for sure. Can I start getting excited about a trip that I'm not sure will happen? I spent more than a year researching and reading about Peru. There was a lot of joy for me reading about tours, hotels, restaurants, ancient site histories, the people, the culture. The anticipation of this trip brought me as much joy as the trip itself will. In my mind I was there. I was engaged and excited. 

So what would help me right now? Get excited about the trip again. Start reading things. Reach out to our tour guide and ask how they're faring through this. Reach out to my girlfriends who are planning to go. Do the things that brought me joy before and got me excited about a future event. It will happen. Even if it's not May 2022. I will get to Peru and it will be amazing.

Start anticipating things. Even if you don't know when exactly it'll happen, start thinking about what you'll do. If it's a vacation, start reading up on it. Seek out some new music so when we can go to concerts again, you'll have some new acts to check out. If it's family you want to see, plan some things you'll do with them. Start talking about it. Share the excitement with someone else! 

3. Be present

I know this sounds like such a cliche now. "Be present" "Be here now." 

Part of the reason why the world is passing by so quickly is that it's happening while you're thinking about something else.

Think about a time that it feels like time is taking forever. It's usually a miserable feeling we get from being somewhere we don't want to be. In those moments, we notice every. little. thing. about not wanting to be there. The smell of the food, the sound of someone's voice, the biased things someone says. We notice everything! And time.....ticks....by.....so....slooooow. 

So notice everything when things are good. Time might not slow down, but you'll have more memories. It's like you've increased the frame rate on your video. You are taking more data in and those bigger memories help us mark time. 

Three options with many options within each one. Pick one and do it. 

Don't even think about trying to do all three. It's too much to ask of ourselves. (I'm talking to my fellow over-achievers out there who put unnecessary demands on ourselves.) 

Wishing you Love ❤️ Magic 🔮 and 7 days in your week 📆

Marjorie