Time

Parents can easily fall into feeling that there is never enough time. We are pressed for it and driven by the lack of it. One morning, I (jkz) heard myself telling one of our daughters when she was about four years old, “Hurry up. I don’t have any time,” as she was selecting which of three dresses to wear that day. What a message.

There are things we can do to give ourselves more time, and to make the best use of the time that we have. We can wake up early enough and get the children up early enough to have time in the morning without rushing. Sometimes it can help if they pick out their clothes the night before. We can work at keeping our own time urgency from coloring everything we do. We can do this by remembering to tune in to our breathing and to see that our fears about the future are just thoughts, while the present—what is happening now—is a precious occasion, not to be trampled on. The timeless quality of the present moment is captured in the little things, like remembering to make eye contact when saying good-bye, or taking a moment now and then for a hug. Of course the key here is not doing any of these things in an automatic way because they’re “good” to do, but allowing them to arise out of our presence and openness.

It is also helpful to listen to the tone of our voice as we realize that we are going to be late. As an experiment, we might try lowering our voice and dropping more deeply into right now, into our body, into this breath.

Another thing we might do is to try not to over-schedule our children and be aware of our impulses to do so. They need time to just be. Downtime slows time down and makes room for imaginative play, alone and with friends. Our children need time to be bored and to find out how to go into boredom and through it, sometimes with guidance from us and sometimes not.

If we are not aware of the effects of time pressures on the family, we run the risk of living lives of ever increasing acceleration and nonstop doing, and passing this way of life on to our children. The trend in the world today, with all the various digital devices that are so ubiquitous and continually pull us out of the present moment by interrupting or distracting us or offering us a “better moment,” is characterized by a former Microsoft researcher, Linda Stone, as a condition of “continuous partial attention.” In the face of this societal disease of perpetual self-distraction, stillness and presence need to be cultivated and brought into the home to restore balance and to nurture those aspects of being that are best touched through nondoing.

Many people who have been through the MBSR program say that waking up early and spending time meditating in stillness sets the tone for their whole day, and is worth far more than the same amount of time spent sleeping longer. They are able to be calmer and more intentional in their approach to what they have to do that day, and what they really care about. They also observe that other people in the family feel the effects of their meditating. Stress levels in the whole family can be lower when one person is practicing mindfulness.

Sometimes, decisions to opt for more time together rather than for making more money can be extremely healthy for a family. It is not always possible to do, but sometimes it is more possible than our own mind would have us think. Otherwise, we may wind up, ironically and tragically, missing what may be most important in our lives as we work to “make a living” without examining what this “living” might be.

Ridiculous the waste sad time,

Stretching before and after.

T. S. ELIOT,
“BURNT NORTON,” Four Quartets