Yesterday it snowed here, only the second snowfall of the year in this area. Given how hilly it is here, it was not a day to take the car out, so I walked a lot and it was great to be out crunching in the snow for a change. As I walked, I also mused on the passage of time and how we view it, as well as the thought of the Cayman saying: “Time longer than rope”
When I moved to Cayman in 1989 one of the staples of life was to pick up the daily (well, Monday to Friday, no issues on the weekend) newspaper, the Caymanian Compass (and, for the Cayman readers, a slightly sad note that the title of this publication has now been watered down to the Cayman Compass).
On the inside front page of “the Compass” was the weather forecast, which, almost every day, simply said: “No Significant Features”, as the weather varied narrowly from hot to hotter, from mostly to blisteringly sunny. With such predictable tropical weather, as well as with daylight hours only varying from 11 hours in mid-winter to 13 in mid-summer, seasons become a bit of an afterthought, particularly given the modern tendency to live and work and drive in air conditioning.
The change in seasons and weather when I moved over to London a few years ago initially shocked and challenged me my first winter, less the cold than the really short daylight hours. However, now in my fourth winter here, I have both adapted and also learned to enjoy the variation and the passage of time. Today on January 25th the days are stretching out at around 3 minutes per day. Now, three minutes per day may not seem like a lot, but over half a year it makes an enormous difference, from under 8 hours of daylights in midwinter to nearly 17 hours of daylight in midsummer. Temperature-wise, the UK is “temperate”, yet we see variations in my area from below freezing in winter to over 35c (95f) on the hottest days in summer.
“Time longer than rope” really has two meanings in Cayman. One of them is, basically, about karma in the negative sense, such that someone who does something negative will, ultimately, see it come back to bite them. However, the broader meaning of the phrase is simply: “be patient”.
Last week I also had a walking meeting that was meant to finish at 4pm, as we figured that was when it would be getting dark. However, we hadn’t factored that three minutes per day, so, walking with the daylight, we ended up going on until around 4:30, as at that point it was still light, being four weeks after the shortest day. That was a simple pleasure, to realise that the days are getting longer, that within two months we will be coming to the end of March and frosts will be a memory of the winter and spring arriving piece by piece.
Our 24/7 news culture has fed through into a political sphere where politicians less and less think like statesmen, ie more and more they think only reactively and of the next moment, rather than proactively and of the next season, the next year, the next generation.
Whoever you lead, whether simply yourself or a business or organisation of 10s of thousands around the world, in leadership it is critical to always maintain focus on the longer term, on the vision, don’t let yourself be always drawn into the reactive moment by moment management of issues, situations, opportunities, challenges. Remember:
Time longer than rope