Forsaking Time

There are few ways quite as sure to invoke groans among family members during a holiday than to respond to a simple question like “what’s the time?” with the classic “island time,” or “beach time,” or whatever relevant setting expects of you an immersion with nature and a letting go of your made-up measuring stick of progress for the week.

It is cliché, but can actually be quite profound when you give the premise a chance. Sometimes it takes us arriving on that holiday to really just how inseparable we’ve become with our watches, or the little numbers in the top-right corners of every screen.

For me, I often find a lot of frustration stems from my perception of how time has been used. I treat it as a commodity; one that needs to be traded at a high price for something worth doing. It also places hard constraints on my day, defining that I can do this activity until a certain time, but not after this specific hour. A felt pressure to use time well then drives stress, constantly providing imaginary benchmarks that are rarely met.

If you didn’t wake up before 8am, maybe you feel like you’ve failed the first step of your morning. Yet, had you never been aware of the time in the first place, I doubt you’d feel so negative about it. Likewise for many other instances every single day where we check those numbers and arbitrarily decide to invest an hour into something, or take a certain action at a certain time. When said time elapses, or arrives, we’ve pre-meditated what we’re going to do next, disconnecting us from the moment itself and perhaps brining discontent.

Of course, having an awareness of time is incredibly useful and unavoidably necessary in each of our lives. Working within the constraints of a clock is not only needed, but often beneficial. If the rare opportunity arises to let go of tracking time completely, though, I’ve found it incredibly liberating to forsake it entirely, just for a short period. Observe how dependent on it you’ve become for guiding your decision-making. How an objective gauge of your progress through the day dominates over your subjective experience of each moment. It is cliché for a reason.