#277: Less Watch, Less Worries
I am very glad I read Corey's piece below exactly when I did today. As someone who is big on frequently checking the time and planning agendas to the quarter-hour, I often find myself rushing around and feeling quite off if I miss a to-do that I aimed to carve out time for, even a small one. And this week, my first week back after a relaxing vacation, I found myself rushing even more and feeling the need to get ahead especially after "lost time" being offline and away from home. And after a few minor personal injuries which resulted due to literally moving too fast and trying to keep up with the ticking time, I realized by Thursday that I needed to slow down and breathe. So Corey's blog below came at the perfect time (no pun intended) for me as I close out a far too fast-paced week. I've realized sometimes I need to spend a little less time planning out the chunks of time in my day in advance and more on simply enjoying all the little unfolding pieces as they come.
- Amanda
Less watch, less worries
In recent months, I’ve spent most of my days living by my calendar appointments. 8AM? Make coffee. 9:15AM? Check in with my to-do list for the day. 1:00PM? Lunch. 2:00PM? Check back in with the calendar for the day. Weekends and evenings (FKA non-work hours) often get calendar events, too, whether for doing life chores or seeing friends. My past self (or someone from work) had made the decision that it was a good thing to schedule all these doings, so I went along with each one as it came up, more or less. And then, vacation happened. A chance for a break from my regimented routine. I thought, for fun, I would do my best to look at my watch and my calendar as little as possible during the week.
Of course, I had to set myself up ahead of time. I took care of the out of office checklist, double checked that notifications were all silenced, and most importantly, set my Apple watch to the Sun Dial watch face (with an analog clock, to see fewer numbers). A shift of focus to the natural rhythm of things.
This idea was inspired by an exercise in Julia Cameron’s “Artist’s Way” book, where she asks Artists to not read any words for one week (other than absolutely necessary for work, and maybe 10 minutes for personal emails). I did this Wordless-Week way back when I was fairly fresh to New York with much less responsibility, and before I had a smartphone; approx 100 years ago. It was no small feat! I quickly realized there were words everywhere in NYC. The subway ads were the worst; they were colorful or clever, and I was a “captive audience”, stuck on the train ’til my stop. I learned that I’d become so used to automatically reading whatever passed in front of my eyes, reaching out visually with my energy and attention, that I would read anything without first deciding if I actually wanted to read it. After a week of avoiding words from the outside, I found I could more readily tune in to the voice I heard on the inside.
Which is NOT to say I didn’t still consider time. But rather kept it by the daylight outside, and my body’s biological clock. I wasn’t worried about if it was 10:00AM (second coffee time), 2:00PM (lunch and news reading time), or 5:00PM (move to schedule-send for messages, rather than immediate send) — like how I remember feeling when I was a kid. Doing whatever it felt necessary to do at the moment, guided by my inner sense of what was next, reminded me of the supposed saying of the teacher Baizhang, regarding the secret of Zen, “Eat when hungry. Drink when thirsty. Sleep when tired.”
I did find I couldn’t fully separate from wanting to keep time and plan out how I would use it. But maybe that wasn’t the purpose. Perhaps it was more about a clean break from my coping choreography of filling each hour with a doing, so there would always be something immediate to look forward to. Maybe now I’m relaxing into once again expanding the depth of my temporal vision… like exhaling after realizing I was holding my breath.