I lost a potential editing client this week because my sense of urgency and time was different from theirs. They called me at the bookstore, and were unhappy that I cut the conversation short because I don’t talk about freelance work while on the clock for other jobs. They had wanted an immediate response, and when I explained that my schedule is set up to handle emails and client outreach on specific days of the week, they were baffled. Their reaction to my assertion of my boundaries around time was a signal that we wouldn’t work well together, but I followed up a couple days later with an email, as I said I would. They told me they were going with another editor who had responded more quickly, and I was honestly relieved.
This is something I think about frequently, as I move through the world and try to navigate relationships, professional and personal. I think about how varying perceptions of time can be at the root of interpersonal conflict.
If something is more urgent for me than it is for someone else, I’m likely to experience impatience, frustration, and get caught up in all kinds of stories about this other person and why they aren’t responding in the way I want and need them to.
I saw this when I was teaching, all the time, in the struggle between students and faculty, faculty and administration, as we all tried to get everyone to value time in the same ways we did. Students needing faculty to understand that they couldn’t prioritize school; faculty needing students to invest time in coursework to meet the curriculum requirements; admin wanting faculty to do more, and more.
A major part of this issue was different perceptions of and values of time. For faculty, the class is their job, and it’s a central part of their life. For students, they have other classes, athletics, jobs, friends, partners, sometimes children, and all manner of other things to take up their time, and choices to be made about how to use their time. For admin, student success is a reflection on faculty effectiveness, and whether or not they are effective with their time. All of these people want their priorities to be the priorities of the others, assuming they are right.
I come against this often, with work, with community involvement, with trying to navigate a social life. The phrase, “If they wanted to, they would” gets tossed around a lot, as people assume that when you don’t make time for something, you don’t care about it, or care about them. There’s a difficulty in understanding that how we use our time is not how everyone else uses theirs, a difficulty in understanding that our priorities are not the same as everyone else’s.
Perhaps, too, this is what we mean when we say “the timing just wasn’t right” when romances fail, when connections are missed. A crush never blossoms to a full romance because the way each of us moves through time is not in alignment. We keep missing each other, things just never quite work right, despite attraction, despite affection. We’re just not in the same place, and so it never quite becomes what it could be.
I think about time as I decide how to use mine. I think about community activism, I think about work, I think about creativity and art, I think about events I go to and events I don’t.
I want time to slow. I want time to move carefully. I need time to be still. I need to feel the world moving around me as I step away and slow time down for myself.
I need empty minutes, hours, so that they can fill, not with tasks, but with emotion and imagination. I need empty minutes so that the tangled jumble of thoughts can sort itself out, so I can breathe, so I can inhabit myself and be present.
Our sense of urgency doesn’t lend itself to empty minutes. Our sense of time and its connection to productivity, the way we have been conditioned to think we have to always be doing, always be working, leads us to rush and actually causes us to lose time.
Slowing down and letting our moments be empty, letting ourselves pause and rest and enjoy and even wallow and be sad… this is how we make the most of our time, not by filling every single moment with every possible activity.
There is so much that I care about, and so many people that I love. But I can’t do it all, and I can’t be there for everyone, just like not everyone can be there for me.
I’ll be focusing my time where I know it works best for me, and to those of you I find in between the ticking seconds on the clock, I’ll cherish the moments we share.
Ink and Vein 