“If you fight with time, time always wins. Better to befriend it, because time is inseparable from yourself.”    Lama Surya Das, New Dharma Talks

So, how conscious are you of your relationship with time? What is the relationship that you currently have? What would you like to co-create together going forward?

When I was younger I was relatively unconscious of my relationship with time. So, I had a tendency to over commit myself. Upon reflection, I think this was influenced by a few things.

First of all, I thought I had an unlimited amount of time, because I felt like I had unlimited energy. One of the great gifts of youth is such an abundance of energy. As we grow older, and hopefully wiser, we learn that time and energy are not infinite resources. They are finite and we must honor them in a way that allows us our own sustainability.

Another influence on my relationship with time was that I was single. My time was my time. I would often say to clients, when I was a therapist that if you want to always do what you want to do, that it might be best to be alone.  When I am sharing part of my time with another, then my time is shared with your time and we must co-create our time. Now what this really means is that I have less time for just me and more time for us. That is sometimes an adjustment for folks!

A deeper insight into my youth was that being busy, and being of service to other people was important to my self-esteem. Therefore, I had a tendency to overextend myself. Based on my desire to be helpful to others, in order to be seen as a person of service (ego), I took on more than I had time for. The unconscious part of this was that time was not the problem, my desire to be liked as a person of service was. Once I figured this out through the help of spiritual direction, I was able to consciously choose a different relationship with time. Quite simply, I learned to say no to things. And to my surprise, the world did not come to an end!

As my relationship with time matured, I learned to pay more attention to how I was doing the relationship. As Surya Das says, “Better to befriend it, because time is inseparable from yourself.” Instead of blaming time as the problem, I came to see that how I managed my relationship with time was the key. If you think about it, we always have the same amount of time, everyday. The amount of time never really changes. How we manage our relationship with time is what changes. And how we see time is what changes us.