You Are Time’s Master

We were sharing snail jokes over coffee.

One of my favorites is “What would a snail say if she were riding on top of a turtle?”

The answer I loved was “Wheeee!”

But there’s another punchline to this joke. In this one, the snail says to the turtle, “Slow down, you lunkhead.”

For a snail traveling at the speed of a turtle, the world would be hurtling past. Depending on the snail, she either loved it or hated it.

Time is relative.

• Time is relative.

And yet we’ve become more enslaved to it than ever. We hustle. We grind. We optimize our morning routines, track our screen time, and set calendar alerts.

We talk about a race against time, deadlines, and wasting time—as if time were something that could slip through our fingers like sand.

Blame Einstein for the phrase “time is relative.” He theorized that all motion is relative rather than absolute. In physics, this concept gets complicated. But for us mere mortals, it’s easy to understand because we experience it constantly.

• So what is time relative to?

If we’re doing something we love—and we allow ourselves to fully immerse in it—time dissolves. Hours vanish.

Some people even forget to eat. (That’s not me. I rarely forget to eat.) But when we’re bored, or anxious, or stuck in something that drains us? Time becomes thick, viscous, almost solid.

My mom didn’t like Sundays. Where she lived, no one visited or did anything on Sundays. With nothing different to do, Sundays crawled by at a glacial pace. She looked forward to Monday.

Del and I love Sundays. If at all possible, we don’t talk to anyone or do anything other than what we want to do. For us, Sundays evaporate like morning mist.

Same twenty-four hours. Completely different experience.

Our perception of what’s happening during a specific period of time makes it expand or contract like a living thing.

Since time is relative, and it’s only our insistence that gives it concrete structure, why are we so attached to the concept?

Why feel guilty about how we spend time—or don’t spend it—whether it’s a snail day or a hummingbird day, when it’s our perception that creates the entire experience?

The accurate measuring of time is surprisingly recent.

Now? We carry atomic clocks in our pockets. We measure productivity in Pomodoro intervals. We get dopamine hits from checking tasks off digital lists. Our smartwatches literally track how we spend every minute.

All businesses have deadlines. Actually, everything has a deadline.

If we look at our material lives, we’re all moving toward the ultimate deadline—where the portal of this lifetime closes and another opens.

But here’s what matters: It’s how we feel about deadlines, what we do to prepare for them, and our awareness of the elasticity of what appears as time that makes all the difference.

The show Dark on Netflix plays with this beautifully—the idea that past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously, that time isn’t the arrow we think it is.

Everything is happening at the same time.

It doesn’t matter if we understand quantum physics, or even if we care about it.

What matters is remembering that we are the ones projecting time onto our lives and what we expect from ourselves.

We are the masters of our perception of time.

When something stressful happens that makes you want to hurry up and fix it, slow down enough to create space for a solution to present itself.

Don’t we all hate it when someone rides our bumper, putting us both at risk because they might be a few minutes late?

Don’t ride the bumper of what you need to get done. Make space. Create margin. Remember that time is elastic.

At different times during the day and in our lives, we operate at varying speeds. Be aware of them. Notice them.

• We are not slaves to time. When we are, we did it to ourselves.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a snail wishing everyone else would slow down, or a snail enjoying the ride on a turtle’s back, or moving so fast most people can’t keep track of what you’re up to.

Doesn’t matter at all—as long as it’s not about time controlling you.

It’s about enjoying the ride and not accepting the limitations of a concrete sense of time. What happens within a space of time is up to us. Let’s find ways to enjoy every bit of it, including the deadlines.

I need deadlines to accomplish tasks that I want to complete. I love completion, so I’ll use every trick I can to get my human resistance out of the way, and deadlines work well for me—for some things.

I always plan to ensure everything is done well in advance of the deadline, as I don’t work well under stress, pressure, or drama. This is a sense of time that works well for me.

Find the one that works for you. Just don’t be a slave to it.

You are time’s master, not its slave.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself saying “Wheeee!” more often. 🐌

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From The Daily Nudge: #194
When Did You First Notice That:
We are not in a race against time; we are in a race against what we expect of ourselves within that time.

TODAY’S STATEMENT:
I am present with the eternal now.