Time, Time, Time is on My Side

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking. Racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. 

Pink Floyd

Time.

Do you take it for granted? I do. I see time as stretching out before me, allowing me to do, see, or otherwise experience just about anything that I could possibly conceive and want to do. And when it comes to thinking about the second half of your life, this perception of time is everything. 

In our book, we shared that Jane and I have entirely different views of the time left to us. Jane sees time as fleeting…she has to cram everything she can in each day she lives. Perhaps her sense of time has developed because both her parents died while she was still in high school. But I think her religion also informs her judgment of time—after all, the Judaeo-Christian concept of time, based on the Bible, is that time is linear, with a beginning and an end. 

I, on the other hand, have a long-lived family and am not very religious. Buddhism, with its wheel of time, intrigues me and perhaps that explains the fact that I see time as gently unfolding before me, with chances for do-overs in my next life. If I don’t do it or get it right this time around, no worries! (I’ve already decided that I’ll dance more in my next life.) 

Being a little nerdy, I turned to the definition provided in The American Heritage Science Dictionary. Paraphrasing its definition, time has the following characteristics:

• It’s a continuous, measurable quantity
• Within that quantity, events occur in a sequence
• Within that sequence, events proceed from the past through the present to the future. 

But if time is measurable why is it so very elusive? After all, we can’t see, touch, smell, or sense it. 

And why does a week crawl painfully slow when you are 11 and speed by ever so quickly when you’re 50? The psychologist, Jean Piaget, called this form of time perception as “lived time.”  

In explaining his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—and it’s longer than any hour.” His statement introduces us to the concept this time’s “continuous, measurable quantity” can be perceived differently by different observers. 

There has been much examination into the mystery of time, so of course there are opposing views to our scientific definition. One such contrasting view is that time does not refer to any kind of quantity “container” that events and objects move through, but is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view is in the tradition of philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, which I don’t pretend to fully understand but I can try to describe of what this means to me. 

When I think about the people we interviewed for Changing Lanes, I see not only role models of second acts in life, but also for thinking about our time on earth. 

Take Binh Rybacki. She has a strong religious background, first as a Buddhist, then as a Lutheran. After migrating to the United States from South Vietnam in 1975, she eventually worked her way into a mid-level IT management position at Hewlett Packard. But a trip back to Vietnam as a translator turned her sense of time on its head. As The Byrds sang, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven......” That single trip convinced Binh that it was time to give back what she was uniquely capable of doing—using American resources to help the children of Vietnam. She’s a wonderful example of Kant’s philosophical approach to time. Read her full story in our book. 

Another person we spoke with was Andrea Mead Lawrence. For her, time stopped. While competing in the 1952 Olympics, she won the giant slalom by an eternity of 2.2 seconds. Then, attacking her first run in the slalom, she caught a ski tip on a gate, spun around and slid downhill backwards. It looked like she was out of the running. But to everyone’s shock, she climbed back up the hill, pointed her boots through the gate and accelerated downhill again, managing to come in fourth on the first run. Combined with her second run, it was enough for her to win her second gold in skiing competition—the first and only American alpine skier to win two gold medals at the Olympics. 

Andrea described what happened: “I have no memory of anything going on around me. Language fails me but the way I define it, I was in what they call the zone—into the center of my energy. That’s where I moved into and that’s where I came from when I was released to the hill. It was one of those few times in life when I realized I’d become the very thing I was doing.” You can also read Andrea’s full story in our book. 

Think about what you can do with time: work against time, gain time, keep time, be on time, kill time, mark time, or be out of time. Time is about the past, present, and the future.  

When I think about the past, that’s what it is—the past. I don’t regret decisions previously made whether they be career choices or relationship entanglements. As I reflect on our change artists, none of them had regrets about past choices. Perhaps belaboring the past prevents the future from coming into full view. 

How about the present? I practice yoga regularly and meditate from time to time. The practice of both yoga and meditation takes as its goal the reflection of the mind back upon itself—what people variously describe as “being in the moment” or “entering the now.” I’ve certainly discovered it’s more satisfying to fully experience each moment I am living and not anticipating what’s ahead. Although, I must confess, when I’m doing a headstand each minute feels like an hour!

And when I’m closing my practice with savasana (corpse pose), 20 minutes goes by as if its only 20 seconds. 

And the future? Like I said, time is on my side. Whenever Rick, my husband, and I realize we’ve just missed a momentary opportunity, one of us will say to the other: “That’s OK. We’ve got 40 years ahead of us to do that.” We are living our lives together with no regrets. 

So, how do you perceive time? Bringing into focus your feelings about this fundamental precept will perhaps help you think more clearly about any lane changes you may want to make. 

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