My obsession with time is not by accident. My grandfather,whom I never had the honor to meet, was a watchmaker in a small town in India. He fixed watches and clocks as he sat in the center of a 500 square feet room surrounded by hours, minutes, and seconds. His fingers glided across each first and second hand. Intricate and fragile, any slip of the hand could, in his world, could break time.
This image replays in my mind, again and again. And it leaves me feeling very vulnerable asking these series of questions: What to do with time? How much am I utilizing it? How much time to do I waste? Am I making the best choices with every day that passes? Do I need to challenge my views on time?
My everyday life is filled with so many things that are undone. The memoir sits in the corner and I am ashamed to admit that the corners of some of the pages are taking on a more vintage look. My desk and bookshelf are inhabited by books I want to read, but never find “time” to start or finish. Everyday I wake up with the intention of using my time in a more productive and better way, but in my mind I fail at this goal.
The truth is I am not spending enough time writing, reading, or immersing myself in the word. My world is full of fractured moments that almost always seem out of focus. I never quite move the kaleidoscope in the right way to bring it all together. Therein lies my most abundant struggle.
I’ve witnessed how one second can change a person’s life. In my marrow, I am reminded again and again how time is finite. So why do I still struggle with truly sitting in the moments in my life and filling it with what really matters? Is it the fear? Is it uncertainty? Is it a combination of over thinking and lack of action?
I have no real answers to these questions, but I do know I am trying to figure out how time is something that I own, that these moments are mine. It is a choice. I need to readjust, keep trying to push the fragments into a place where I know that I am truly inhabiting the moment with what is important to me.
Carrying that image of my grandfather with his careful attention to each detail, gives me pause. It reminds me to take a deep look into where I am, what I am doing, and how much of my own life is like the first and second hand of a clock.
Ticking, ticking, always. But I control whether or not it breaks.
Welcome! I am a lawyer turned freelance writer, essayist, and editor. On staff at Literary Mama and the co-founder and co-editor of the literary journal, The Sunlight Press, my essays and reported work have appeared in The Washington Post, The Lily, Saveur, Civil Eats, Brain, Child, ESPN and elsewhere. I am currently at work on a memoir on grief and culture and how it provides perspective on life’s ordinary graces. I invite you to appreciate the ordinary with me. I hope my daily practice of seeing the magic in the mundane helps you celebrate and find more of these moments in your life too.
There seem to be periods in life when we have too much time on our hands, whether we realize it or not, to think too profoundly, perhaps to feel too profoundly, just how precious each moment is.
Given my own propensity to analyze and go deep inside my head, I am sometimes grateful that survival requires non-stop busy-ness toward productive, money-making ends, or I come to the end.
In a way, that lack of time and pull away from notions of time and what I’m not doing is of assistance. I am strangely more in the moment when I’m working in it or experiencing it, even if at times in a frenzy or a rush, rather than trying to capture it in a more focused way.
Time is something we will never own. We can manage it somewhat by priorities and schedules, but when we become too rigid with time we miss some of the best moments of life. When I don’t accomplish what I feel I should I remind myself that perhaps it wasn’t meant to be done at that time.
You’ve captured my muddled mind so well here…I think we’re so similar in this regard, Rudri. I too struggle with time, a lot. I complain wistfully at how fast it goes, and yet I squander it. “Over thinking and lack of action”…I feel that is the everyday reality of my life. I think things were easier when I had less choice in how my time was spent – when a baby or toddler dictated my schedule. My child is older now and I work for myself (we’re in similar situations) and I struggle to give valuable, worthwhile shape to my days.
I am so mad at time right now…for going too fast and for there never, ever being enough of it. Right there with you!