We all struggle with our relationship with time. Some moments we appreciate time and in a way get greedy wishing time would not be so fleeting. Other moments we completely despise time and wish we could hit the forward button as many clicks as it takes to get us into the good parts of our life again. As humans we constantly struggle with this roller-coaster relationship we have with time. At various moments thinking "wow I really wish I had more control over the timing of that." But in reality you have all the control in the world; you have control over how you react to time.
Time is actually subjective, with us constantly determining whether or not time is the bad guy or good guy. When time is actually neither; time is never changing, we as a person are the only thing that changes how fast or slow we believe time is going. On good days of course we are going to thinking time is fleeting, and on bad days think time is holding us by the ankles pouring cement around our feet. In reality time is moving by just like it always has, so why let ourselves believe any different? Torturing ourselves with trying to control something we have absolutely no control over.
I have a person in my life who wants more than anything to be a photographer, but constantly goes through ups and downs with wondering if he's even going to be successful. Some days time is moving quickly, he gets a couple jobs at once, and is satisfied. Other days he hasn't done a shoot in weeks, there isn't even a nibble in someone asking him for work, and he feels like he's watching an hourglass drop one piece of sand at a time. However looking at everything as a whole, he has come really far from where he was. Which then brings me back to the point about how subjective time is.
If we stand back and look at time as a whole we begin to realize it needs to exist as a whole for us to grow, and therefore only can exist as its whole self. Just the same as good can not exist without evil, or we would never be able to separate the two from each other. We can not have the good without the bad. If every day was the same we would never change or challenge ourselves. So in my friends case without the moments of him thinking "my career is going no where I should probably try even harder to look for more work", he would never have moments where he would be flooded with work. The more patience and understanding we have with time the more we can begin to see it as a whole. So in fact all the long draining moments, will always give way to moments we wish we could pause.
Have you ever been in such a rough patch in your life that every night you go to bed thinking "I am never going to feel better."? Then a couple weeks go by and miraculously you start to think less about why you were feeling so low. Then a couple months go by and you're back in another groove starting to feel like yourself again. Then in a couple years you can't even remember that bad feeling because life is great right now. But in that moment all you could think of was "I am never going to feel better." In that moment I bet you were thinking to yourself too that time was going so slow. Really time was doing what time always does you were just so wrapped up in how you were feeling it was hard for you to take a step back, and realize this is only a brief moment in your life.
Everything always gets better, it may not happen in the amount of time we desire to feel better, but if we all learn to have a little more faith in time we can have more control over it.
A good friend of mine always likes to talk about time in a mathematical way. Breaking it down into centimeters and inches. Recently I was talking to him about how I have no idea, how im going to make it through the next two years of college, he simply replied it's only two inches. Slightly confused I looked at him and asked what on earth was he talking about. His answer was simple; "if you look at your life it's roughly around eighty inches, only two of those inches you're dreading right now. That is such a small fraction of your life so why invest the amount of worry you would for bigger fraction?" The simple answer to his question is, you shouldn't.
Every person I have ever met struggles with patience and fully living in the moment. It is mere human nature to want to control time. Instead we should all learn how to control our outlook on time.
The more we practice taking a step back and not get so wrapped up in time the easier it is to get control over how we react to time. So instead of trying to make time go forward or pause, take time as it really is; and live moment by moment. Once we start to let our minds wander and project into the future is when we begin to lose our perspective of time. We really have no idea exactly what is going to happen, but we do have control over the reaction we have to where time leads us.
So if life is terrible right now and all you want to do is to know where you're going to be in a couple weeks or months, don't keep trying to imagine what life will be like. Instead take a step back and think to yourself, "okay why is my life terrible right now?" Did you; have something happen to you out of the blue, make a mistake and cause a problem, or maybe even just simply started living life too fast you lost sight of what was going on in the present? Whatever it was all you can do now is take a step back and think about what you can do in the moment to make your life go in a more positive direction. So if years down the road you want to be a professional photographer, stand back and think what can you do right now to point your life in that direction. Maybe go build a website or contact a few people if they're interested in your work. Or you made a mistake and just want to patch things up with someone in your life, but don't know if that will ever happen. Take a step back and better yourself, give them space, but let them know you are doing what you can in the moment to make a better future.
Whatever it is that you want in life, do yourself a favor and make little changes each moment of the day to let time help you achieve your goals. Time really is not against you, really it wants to be the thing that allows you to grow and learn.
