A Matter of Time

When I was eight years old, my parents put me on a Trailways bus in Baltimore to visit my dad’s cousin in Brooklyn, New York. Since nearly all of my extended family lived in New York City, I’d traveled there often enough to be familiar with the ride. I wasn’t afraid of the trip or even of riding the bus alone.

What concerned me most was that I’d miss out on fun stuff at home.

My last words to my parents as I boarded the bus were, “Don’t do anything fun until I get back.” I meant it. There were even meals I hoped they wouldn’t have while I was away.

This story – which my mom and dad told way past the point where it might be cute – sums up my lifelong relationship with time. As a kid, I was afraid of missing out. But as I grew older and acquired more responsibility, this FOMO morphed into a dandy little case of productivity anxiety. I want to absorb every minute. There is always too much to do, but I don’t want to miss a thing. This means that everything that must be done has to happen NOW.

To say I struggle with time is like saying Einstein was a scientist. Even as I write this, it’s hard not to think of everything else I could be doing, want to be doing, NEED to be doing. It’s hard to justify sitting here doing this one thing without thinking of all the other things.

And yet, I believe in inhabiting each moment. Each second comes with events and choices that impact the next one. It isn’t possible (or wise) to do everything all at once, especially when “everything” can change based on decisions made even a instant before.

You can see my difficulty – or at least my inconsistency.

Even with all my time-neuroses, I understand that filling the mind with a list of things to do doesn’t allow me to understand or absorb very much. It doesn’t respect the thing I’m actually doing at the moment. When I worry incessantly about what I’m not doing or might be missing, I miss the nuances of what I AM doing. I potentially miss the present moment’s trigger for what happens next.

I’m writing this on my last day in Boston, a city that got into my blood decades ago and never left. With only a few days here this time around, you can bet I’ve tried to experience All The Things. It’s been a wonderful whirlwind of catching up with thoughts and dreams.

This visit has also reminded me of another benefit of taking my time with time: if I do a deep dive into each moment, I’m not here for only a few days. Moments I’ve experienced in this city string together like pearls, existing in the present-tense instead of as a disconnected passel of memories. Time becomes less linear, more spherical. It’s as close as I’m going to get to having it all at once.

Of course, eight-year-old me couldn’t possibly understand the value of relinquishing control, of leaving space for things to unfold at the right moment. Stepping onto that bus for New York opened up a whole new path she’d never have experienced had she continued trying to micro-manage her world.

Grown-up me is still a work-in-progress with too much of a tendency to want to drive that bus.