How I Stopped Hurrying Into the Future

A friend of mine who travels a lot told me recently that a couple of weeks ago she was in the check-in line in the airport in Amsterdam and the guy ahead of her was just losing it over some problem with his ticket or his flight.  When my friend got to the counter herself she said something to the airline clerk about the guy’s behavior and the woman said that that had been happening a lot lately, way more than it used to – people really losing it over relatively minor travel problems.  In fact, she said, it was a noticeable trend; other people who worked in the airport had noticed it too during the last year.

            “Why do you think it’s happening?” my friend asked her.  “And what do you think passengers can do to keep from getting so upset over traveling problems?”

            The woman gave my friend a one-word answer:  “Mindfulness.”  She went on to say that most of the people she waits on don’t seem to be in the moment at all; in their minds they’re already in the next place, the place they’re flying to, and if anything gets in the way of their going there right now, they get really, really angry.

            I nodded when my friend said all that:  It makes perfect sense.  It also, I thought, has major implications for harnessing time.   

Since I’ve been planning my days a la my harnessing time system – sitting down first thing in the morning or at any point during the day and deciding how to use the time I’ve got – I’ve become a lot more able to be present in the day and in the moment.  I’ve always thought of mindfulness as the ability to be present in whatever’s going on around or inside me, instead of, say, being lost in my thoughts, my worries, my projections about who said what to who yesterday or what I should do tomorrow or should be doing right now et cetera. I still think of mindfulness that way, and I’ve always wanted more of it in my life, have always known intuitively that being present in the moment was the solution to just about all my problems.  What’s changed since I’ve been harnessing time is what I think about how you can achieve mindfulness.

I used to think of mindfulness as a state of consciousness that I could and should achieve, more or less permanently, if I tried – tried more, tried harder – if I would only stop forgetting all about mindfulness and lapsing back into not-mindfulness.   But no matter how hard I tried to remember to be mindful, I kept forgetting.  And trying to be mindful didn’t work either, because whenever I try to think or feel anything it automatically slips away from me. 

What I’ve gotten from harnessing time is a set of tools that I can pick up and use no matter what my state of mind is.  Using the tools changes my state of mind with no further effort on my part.  That way I sidestep the whole trying-cancels-out-letting-go-and-just-being conundrum.  (There’s another tool I use to get to mindfulness too – a certain writing exercise I’ve stumbled on -- but that’s a different subject for another day and maybe for a different blog spot.)  The mindfulness I get from harnessing time is the mindfulness of being where I am in time instead of being somewhere else in the past or the future.  I might not always be aware of everything around me in the present moment – the light in the room, the sound of birds outside my window, how my body feels as I sit here in my chair -- but I’m definitely living in the present -- in the day, the hour, the minute where I am – instead of projecting myself into the future, like that guy in the airport in Amsterdam.  And there’s a much better chance that I’ll be aware of everything around me too.

Harnessing time gives me the ability to do one thing at a time.  At any given moment during the day I’m grounded in what I’m doing and I know when I’m going to stop doing that and start doing something else.  I know how much time I actually have to do what I’m doing, and if I start to feel rushed I look at what time it is and at my plan and decide whether or not I do actually have enough time to do what I’m doing.  (Usually I do have enough time – I’m just afraid that I don’t.)  And if something takes longer than I thought it would – if a flight is delayed or something -- I simply recalibrate.   All of that gives me a much better chance of relaxing, getting peaceful, and being present in the moment, maybe even looking around me and seeing what’s there.  Because rushing and all the feelings that go with it – anxiety, irritation, anger, even outright rage -- is really just a matter of trying to get somewhere faster than you can actually go there.  And if you know where you’re going to be for the next twenty minutes or hour or three hours or whatever, then you have a lot better chance of actually settling down and being where you are.

Lately I’ve been noticing another advantage of my harnessing-time-induced awareness in the present moment.  I’ve got a lot of stuff coming up in the next couple of months:  teaching, public speaking, traveling so I can teach and speak in other places – that kind of stuff, and while I’m grateful that I get to do it all, I also feel a little overwhelmed by it all, and all of it makes me just a little bit nervous.  I keep catching myself worrying a little bit about what I’m going to be doing – How am I going to feel when I’m going through it?  Am I going to succeed with everything or will I somehow screw up or fluff my lines?  Will I come down with a cold or have crippling insomnia or…  whatever.   I used to be an all-out victim of that kind of worrying, but now that I’m harnessing time, whenever I notice myself going to those places in the future, I look at my plan for today, I remember what I’m doing at this moment, and I settle back into where I am right now.   And then I remember that for all the times I’m going to be teaching and traveling and public speaking in the next couple of months, there will be just as many times, in fact a lot more times, when I’ll be hanging out and doing nothing, reading a mystery novel, wearing my sweat pants.   I think of how if I’m projecting myself into the future – having a virtual imaginary experience of something unpleasant (because whoever worries that it’s all going to be good?) – I’m missing out on what I have going on that’s nice and peaceful right now.  And I come back to the fact that everything is always fine, nice, okay, whatever it is in the present, and it’s only in the imaginary, worried-about future that things look really scary.

                                                      --- Mary Allen

                                                      

Another Special Challenge of the Day Off

Last Sunday I had another chance to take a crack at the special challenge of the day off.   (See The Special Challenge of the Day Off for the last time I grappled with this.)

As I’ve said before, I crave chunks of time when I don’t have to do anything, and last Sunday I had an entire day like that.  I didn’t have to teach or coach; I didn’t even have any social engagements.  All week long I looked forward to all that open time on Sunday.   And all week long, whenever I thought of something I needed to do that I didn’t have time for, I said to myself, I can do that on Sunday.  

            On Sunday morning I wrote down all the things I’d been looking forward to having enough time to do on that day, and then some, in the notebook I use for planning my days.  My list was long and varied, with everything from “work with Twitter” (I have an account but haven’t done enough with it to get any mileage from it), to “shop for purse” (I really, really need a new one, not really because I want one but because I’m worried people will think less of me when they see my current old battered black-leather one), to “do some soul searching about X,” to “work in the yard.”  I’d felt like I desperately wanted to do all those things when I didn’t have enough time for them during the week (well, maybe not desperately, but at least fairly strongly), but now that I did have time for them they didn’t appeal to me at all.  Still, I couldn’t let go of the idea that I should do at least a fair number of those things.

            Once I’d made my list, I started to feel busy instead of relaxed and spacious.  I suddenly felt like I had too much to do and not enough time to do it, instead of like I had all the time in the world and I could do whatever I wanted to with it.  I knew I had a choice here -- that I could choose the latter rather than the former and that if I did my whole day would end up better – but somehow I couldn’t seem to make the right choice and get to that spacious place.   I couldn’t figure out when I wanted to do what, either.  I was tired too, but I didn’t want to waste the day lying around resting, partly because it was a beautiful day in May – sort of.   The weather kept changing its mind:  First it would be warm and sunny, with a glorious blue sky; then the sun would go behind a cloud and the atmosphere would start to feel gloomy and oppressive; then it would get nice again.  I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to do according to what the weather was doing and how energetic I felt at any given moment (somehow when the sun went in I seemed to have less energy than when it was out.)  I got more and more confused about what to do and my mood rapidly deteriorated, despite the fact that I kept thinking I should be able to have a great day.  In fact, that thought – that I should be able to use my harnessing time tools to rescue the day and feel better – just made me feel even worse.  And the fact that I’ve been going around telling everyone that I’ve developed tools to harness time – to stop feeling like I don’t have enough time and start feeling like I do have enough, and since one of those tools is planning my day by figuring out what I’m going to do when and then spending the day happily, peacefully, et cetera – didn’t help any either.

            I never did manage to settle down and enjoy my day on Sunday.  The best I could do was stumble through the day and tell myself I’d have a better day tomorrow.  I did manage to buy a new purse, and although I felt like I wasn’t very productive, when I looked at the list I had made on Sunday morning I was able to cross off a number of other things on there too.  But I never managed to enjoy the moments of the day, never got – or had, or created -- the open spacious relaxed feeling I wanted and had anticipated.  In fact, if anything I enjoyed the day less than I do those days when I have lots of things I have to do.  I did finally manage to get peaceful on Sunday evening when the day with its opportunities to be productive was over and I could settle down and peacefully watch an old episode of Parenthood that I got from Netflix.  When I had no more expectations of doing anything that was in any way… better.

            So there it is, I guess:  It’s all about expectations.  I’ve always struggled with expectations:  Holidays, birthdays (my own, of course), Friday and Saturday nights (i.e., date night), even beautiful days have all been minefields of disappointment and misery at various times, because of what I think I should be doing, should be feeling, should have that I don’t have, should … you name it.  And when I look forward to those whole days off, when I imagine everything I’m going to do and how gloriously free, open, spacious I’m going to feel, that creates the conditions for expectations, and once there are expectations there’s bound to be, if not disappointment, at the very least pressure.   Pressure as in shoulds.   This should be better than it is, I should be doing more than I’m doing, I should be feeling better than I am.  Which creates the conditions for rushing and hurrying – for straining, trying, efforting, to use a newly coined word I heard recently, which seems incredibly apt in this case.  And efforting, as we all know, makes it practically impossible to relax, expand into the moment, and enjoy whatever there is.

            I’ve never been able to figure out what to do about expectations.  I can’t make myself let go of expectations because I can’t make myself let go of anything:  The very idea is a contradiction in terms.

            But I can keep creating those days off – those whole day-long open spaces -- and experimenting with them.  Noticing what works and what doesn’t work.   And maybe some day I’ll get it right – I’ll be able to settle into my time off with an expansive, restful, peaceful feeling -- if not for a whole day, then maybe for an hour or two or even just twenty minutes.   I’m sure it will be well worth it.

                                                            -- Mary Allen

On the Loveliness of Open Spaces

Last weekend a friend of mine was visiting from out of town.  On Friday we drove to a nearby town to visit our local astrologer, have lunch, and shop in some antique stores.  Around here, any trip beyond the outskirts of Iowa City involves traveling on a two-lane highway surrounded by vast open rolling cornfields.   I still can’t get over it, and I moved here from New England, where all you ever see is trees growing right up to the edge of the road, almost twenty-five years ago. When I lived in Massachusetts I breathed a sigh of relief every time I got to the edge of the ocean.  And now the same thing happens – my entire being breathes some metaphysical sigh of relief -- whenever I drive along those country roads, open fields spreading out as far as the eye can see in every direction, the fields meeting the edge of the wide blue sky out on the horizon, cumulous clouds towering overhead.  When you look in the rearview mirror you see the two-lane highway slipping away behind you, it too surrounded by fields and sky, reflected in the mirror.

I love all the open space out here.  It turns out I crave open spaces.  

I crave open spaces in my life too – chunks of time when I don’t have to do anything.  Time to think, time to be, time to stop focusing on the busy insistent outside world and what it wants and needs from me.  Time to connect with some larger smarter wider more expansive part of myself.  Open spaces are crucial to writers – we write during open spaces and writing itself is a kind of opening that requires space to open into.  But I’m absolutely convinced that everyone needs open spaces in their days, in their lives, that some deep crucial part of us craves them and needs them.   Needs them the way the body needs essential nutrients, craves them the way I crave the sight of open fields and sky and water.  And it’s a lot harder to get those open spaces than it seems like it would or should be.

I’m busy like everyone else these days, of course, and it’s not that easy to find time to do nothing.  I have to make the time, believe I should and deserve to make the time, and then I have to hold onto the time once I’ve made it.  And even if I do all that, I’m not necessarily guaranteed an open space.  I’ve come to believe that the problem – and therefore the solution – to not having open spaces in our lives isn’t just a matter of how much time we have and don’t have.   I think it’s also – maybe even mostly -- a matter of how we think.   That we can ruin whatever open spaces we have by filling them up with thoughts:  thoughts about how busy we are, what we have to do later, what we should be doing now instead of what we’re doing, even thoughts about how well we’re using this open time, worries that we’re wasting it -- not to mention thoughts about our partners, children, jobs, finances, you name it.    

Years ago, when I had all my time to write, I could sometimes get so uptight about what I had to do later it would actually interfere with my ability to sit there and concentrate now. I was only able to write for a few hours on any given day (any more than four hours at a stretch and you start to ruin it instead of making it better), but I had to feel like I had all my time that day to write in order to be able to do it.  I also felt tense, to the point where I could barely write, if I thought someone was going to call me or I was going to have some other interruption during my writing time.  Now I don’t have all my time to write and I don’t have the luxury of letting my thoughts ruin whatever open spaces I’ve got for it.  I’ve had to learn how and where to fit those open spaces into my life and how to stick to them after I’ve created them.  And I’ve had to learn how to make use of my open spaces when I get them, to stop thinking about what wants to interrupt me, forget about whatever I think is trying to crowd out my time.  If possible, during my open spaces, I stop thinking all together.

My open-space-making isn’t easy and it’s not perfect.  But on most days I do make some open space to write:  When I plan my day I schedule in some writing time and I try to stick to that time.  I wish I had longer writing times -- in fact I’m working on consolidating the other things I do to make longer writing times; I can feel the greediness in me for those longer open spaces even as I write this.  (It occurs to me that one of the reasons I chose to be a writer is that it gives me an excuse, even an obligation, to keep those open spaces in my life.)  For now my writing times are what they are and I do my best to make good use of them, and I make a concerted effort not to give them away when something else comes along, even something that feels kind of urgent.   I also make open spaces when I’m not writing – I write them right down on my daily planning calendar:  times when I don’t have to do anything but think, stare out the window, nap, read a book.  The longer I’ve been harnessing time the more I value those rest times, and new research even shows that rest and renewal times are necessary for optimal productivity. (See Relaxing, Renewing, and Refreshing the Mind.) 

And every day, for ten minutes, I make an open space in which I meditate.   I sit in a comfortable chair, close my eyes, and try to listen to the sounds around me, and when thoughts arise I picture them falling like ashes to the bottom of my inner picture.  When I can stop thinking, even for a few seconds, something sweet, happy, expansive opens up inside my mind, and afterwards I feel just a little bit better all day long than I do if I didn’t take that ten minutes to meditate.  (See The Power of Ten Minutes.) 

I sort of believe that any time you open up some space inside yourself, you make it easier to do it again (the way any time you work out at the gym it’s easier to do it the next time you go to the gym), and that whatever little bit of openness you’ve managed to create lingers like a whiff of fresh air – like a good scent from a strange mountain, to quote Robert Olen Butler – that wends its way into the rest of your being-alive space, making it just a little bit less crowded and busy in there. So even if you can only give yourself ten minutes of open space a day, and even if you can only stop thinking and listen to the sounds around you for a few seconds during that time, it really does matter.  It can be one of the best uses you’ll ever find for ten minutes, one of the best ways you can harness time to do something for yourself.

                                                -- Mary Allen

           

Harnessing Time to Look at Kittens

            This morning I went over to my friend’s house to see two tiny foster kittens she got yesterday.   (They were spotted by a passerby in a ditch near a street corner, their mother nowhere to be found, and brought to the animal shelter; my friend is fostering them for a month until they’re big enough to be adoptable.  For about forty-five minutes she, I, and her nine-year-old son crouched on the floor and watched and commented on the kittens' every move:  two tiny little fluffy things tottering around on bow-legs, staring out at the new world through round blue alarmed eyes.  They’re excruciatingly, unbearably cute:  they have the super-power of cuteness, as another friend’s son said about my cat when she was a kitten.)  Yesterday afternoon I took time out from my day to make a pasta dish my friend told me was really good (it was good, even with tofu substituted for chicken), and later today I’m going to stop whatever else I’m doing and clean my bathroom.  I’m happy that I’ve learned how to harness my time to do those things -- peacefully, mindfully, without guilt or rushing to get to them or through them.  Happy that these days I actually do them. 

I’ve been harnessing time for a few years now, and one of many important things I’ve learned from it is that the little things we do purely for pleasure, just for ourselves – cook something new, go for a walk with friends, sit and sketch, take a nap – matter a lot more than we usually think they do. 

            Time, as I keep saying, is like the wind – an incredible resource we can use to accomplish anything if we can harness it and use it for our own purposes instead of walking into it or letting it blow us around. I harness time by consciously deciding how I’m going to use the time I have every day, and by calling my time partner  (another friend of mine) and telling her what my plan is.  My friend tells me her plan too, and we tell each other in detail how our days went yesterday -- what did and didn’t go according to our plans. 

It was through this sharing that I learned what I know now about the importance of the little things.  I realize, of course, that I’m not the first person to say that it’s the little things that count; it’s been said so many times before it’s practically a self-help cliché.   But it wasn’t until I started planning my days and, in particular, hearing my friend’s daily plans, that I felt the truth of it all the way down to my bones.  

I love finding out every single thing my friend plans to do today and what she did and didn’t do yesterday – how she wants to use or did use her daily allotment of twenty-four hours – but I’ve noticed that I really perk up whenever she says she’s going to do one of those little, just-for-the-pleasure-of-it things.  (I highly recommend doing daily harnessing time check-ins with a friend; see Harnessing Time with a Little Help from My Friend and With a Little More Help from My Friend.)

Day after day, I’ve noticed that I get a light, airy, open, happy feeling whenever my friend tells me she’s going to do some little thing just for herself, and through that noticing I’ve come to see, to really believe, that those things are not just merely fun, not just guilty little pleasures, distractions from the real urgent necessary work of the day – they’re important.  They redeem us and spiritually feed us; they might even be what we remember when we look back on our weeks, months, years, lives.

(Will I remember this a month from now?  I try to ask myself that whenever I’m in a twist over something, and almost invariably the answer is no.) 

For a while, about ten years ago, I made two lists in a notebook at the end of every day; on one list I wrote ten things I was grateful for or that went well that day and on the other I wrote ten things I felt bad about.  It turned out that the things that were going right in my life were almost exclusively big and enduring, whereas the things that were going wrong were all stuff that wouldn’t matter in a day or so -- in a month at the most.  And yet the bad stuff was what I was focusing on, if not outright consumed by; it was commanding almost all of my attention on any given day.  

And I sort of think that when we focus on what we have to do instead of what we want to do, something similar is going on.

I have this theory that when we’re really, really busy – feeling totally overwhelmed by everything we have to do – there’s a good chance that we’re doing something, maybe a whole bunch of somethings, maybe even everything, not really for our own sakes but because we think someone else wants or needs us to do them.  We feel like we have to do those things because someone else will… suffer, get mad, be disappointed, fire us, reject us, think badly of us, not give us what we want (choose one of the above or make up some more).  (And for more about this idea See The People-Pleasing Trap.)  When I was writing down all the bad things that were bothering me, most of them had to do with other people too:  someone was mad at me, or some potential boyfriend had abandoned me, or something I had written was being rejected by someone, et cetera. 

All of this is leading up to why, I think, doing those little things that are good for us and only us, feels so good.   And maybe why doing everything we have to do feels so bad, or at the very least urgent, hectic, and un-fun.

I’m not suggesting that we all toss aside our obligations and just do whatever we want all the time.  Most of us couldn’t do that even if we wanted to; there are people, places and things in our lives that require our attention, we need to have jobs and do them effectively in order to survive.  And even if we do have all our time to do whatever we want whenever we want, as I did for a while, sort of, when I had money from a book contract and nothing else I had to do but write, we can still manage to feel overwhelmed with everything we ought and need to do; when I had all my time at my own disposal I worried constantly about whether I was writing long enough, whether I should be doing more to clean my hour, fix my house, etc.  It was as if I was trying to make myself stay busy, and feel busy, because if I didn’t I felt guilty.

So that’s the bottom line, I guess.  It’s all about attitude, all about what we do inside our heads, whether we’re the busiest person in the world or someone with absolutely nothing we have to do.  That’s great news because we can work on changing our attitudes.  And in the meantime there are some simple easy measures we take that in and of themselves might change our attitudes.  We can look at how we’re going to spend our day today and decide to throw in one or two little things we want to do instead of feel like we have to do.  Things like reading a novel, hanging out for a while doing nothing, going to a friend’s house to play with some kittens.  And when the urge comes to toss those things aside because it turns out we’re just too busy to do them, we can ignore that urge, do whatever nice thing we planned, and see what happens.  Maybe nothing bad will happen if we take a little time off and do something fun just for the hell of it.  In fact, more than likely something good will happen. 

And maybe, just maybe, it will turn out that we do have time for ourselves after all.

                                                            -- Mary Allen