don’t have time

I seem to have an internal clock that has me always feeling late or behind. It must be genetic. My dad and I often sat in the car waiting for my mom and brother to get ready growing up. The engine was on, my dad was ready to back up at a moment’s notice, and they were nowhere to be found. When I started to get to know my birthmom, I noticed too how we both showed up early, somewhere in the 5-10 minute range depending. For me, sometimes I’d get there hours early, nervous about driving up from San Diego to LA both because of the traffic and because of my psychological state. In high school and college, I started doing any future assignments that were fleshed out enough weeks or sometimes months in advance. I remember a neuroscience class that required us to write papers about research articles we read. I wrote all three the first few weeks of the semester and simply had to print them out when the time came. I’m always looking for wiggle room from an item I can cross off. I’m the same way with work, often sitting on a pile of ideas, drafts, and pieces in progress waiting for me to pick them up, move them forward a little bit, and loop back.

The engine of my mind struggles to stop. I’ll catch myself furiously washing my hands or brushing my teeth or cleaning a kitchen item as I cook on another. I don’t always notice it! Sometimes it’s taken other people pointing it out like on a work call where I was taking notes, writing in the chat, and contributing to the discussion. To me, it helps me be hyper engaged in whatever task I’m doing but sometimes it veers quickly into a frenzy of speed for… no reason.

I was listening to Tara Brach a few months ago when she shared one of her repeat stories about a woman who had a baby and had cancer (oof). She had about a year to live and her mantra became “I don’t have time to rush.” Here’s Tara telling the story in a four minute clip. It reminds me of a set of quotes I’ve read over the years, including this from Lao Tzu:

“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.”

When did I start running out of time? Have I always been like this? I’m trying hard to catch it, slow down, and just do one thing or nothing at all. I’ll likely turn my phone off tomorrow to help. It’s easier to go slow when you don’t know how much time is passing and can’t access a forever to do list.

As my high school therapist liked to point out, it must be doing something for me though because I keep doing it. If I had to guess, it provides some level of safety thanks to the wiggle room I think I’m getting. I’ve had some bad mental health crashes in my life and I think that’s where this “always be ahead” state has come from. Being ahead keeps me from getting behind even when I crash and crash hard. When the words are hard to come by, I can pick up a draft and lean on my past self. When it’s all too much, I can take the day off knowing it won’t matter–I’m still “ahead”. It lets me rest. Perhaps it’s just all a byproduct of the grind of working in tech. What really makes me curious is what happens when I can no longer be ahead and when I do fall behind. Will I be kind to myself? Will others be? How will my relationship to time and the concept of being “behind or ahead” evolve? It needs to.