“The past, present, and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones” – Albert Einstein.

My Dad was obsessed with time. We often arrived early to events, and if he felt we were not moving quickly enough, he would yell, “I’ll be in the car,” to make us move faster. Even though I found this trait challenging, I managed to inherit it, and now I know the stress he felt when it seemed people or events did not move based on his definition of time. What a crazy haunting.

Curiously, my chosen career was project management, in which all activities were tracked, and a deadline always needed to be met. This need for structure was transferred to every activity I did. Chores, social, exercise, and eating were all assigned a mental start and end time. Having this mentality meant I enjoyed an activity but always had a background noise dictating its duration, and if something was running late, I would immediately feel agitated. Utter madness!

Before quitting smoking, I went through years living the quit-start cycle, dreading the inevitable question, “How long has it been”? This simple ask automatically caused my mind to think that a period of time had to pass for it to be considered legitimate. Another self-imposed artificial timeline, resulting in added stress, obsessive thinking, and a return to the wicked little habit. I finally ended up reading a book about quitting smoking authored by Allan Carr. His book stated, among many things, that as soon as you put your last cigarette out, you should consider yourself a non-smoker and should celebrate that fact. After reading the book more than once, I finally understood that this simple change in my perspective, removing time, allowed me to extinguish my last cigarette successfully.

Time does have a purpose that enables business to function, events to be planned, and “real” deadlines to be met, which probably equates to less than half of my waking hours. What about the rest? What if I could live the balance of my day without an artificial start and end? What if it was all about just living the experience at hand? What if I didn’t concentrate on the next thing but allowed it to arise organically and not from a place of stress? There is a thought that magical things arise from the mind at peace. Smoking tethered my soul and was freed with the removal of time. What other time-limited restraints can I remove, and what magical freedom awaits?  

Retirement has seen me working at releasing my time limitations, and I am the first to admit it is a work in progress. I hate to say it, but unlearning a behavior takes time. In this case, I think it is achievable without looking at a clock.