Today we have now moved into August and I had a moment of “Where did the time go?”.
In a few days, it will have been four months since I moved into this house and that feels at once like the time has flown by whilst also feeling like it is dragging, as the constant stream of managing and doing small tasks to get the place as I want it is beginning to feel like drudgery. It will take about another three months to get “90% there” and I know, as I face forward to the next period, that time will also feel both like it takes an age as well as, once it is past, that it took but moments.
Most recently on the house (I won’t bore you with such domesticity much longer), the main room in the house was redecorated last week. I already can barely remember what that room looked like before (with a dark “accent” colour on one wall and over fifty screw holes in the walls from the last owners).
Another reflection on time is that one year ago today I had finished chemotherapy four days prior and was beginning to feel “normal” and that I could look forward to life beyond daily routines of taking toxic tablets and feeling, well, s***. Again, that moment seems distant in my memory, but at the time every day felt momentous.
Finally on reflecting on how time feels, yesterday I wrote “Excelling Invisibly“, making a point for leaders around the sporting excellence of Jordan Crooks, a physically massive 21-year-old young man and one of the top sprint swimmers in the world. I can also take myself back in a moment to refereeing local swim meets a decade ago when he was a tiny 11-year-old powering his tiny frame up and down the Cayman pools in the butterfly. I can remember that as if it were yesterday.
Time is fascinating, as is our relationship with it. For a longer read on time, I wrote “What clock are you on?” back in May 2019, over four years ago. I will close today with the same entreaty I shared to close that previous post on time:
Time as a construct is so deeply entrenched for us that we rarely give awareness to how we related to it, the clock we are on. Now that you have that on your mind, I encourage you, in your leadership, to consider what clock others may be on. When you listen to them, look to listen for that, look to understand their relationship to time and how that may impact their choice, decisions, actions, work.