Posted by Erin Autio on Friday, October 30th, 2020 5:22 pm
There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks in a year. This does not change. We can’t create more or reduce to less. We are bound by these hours as we go about our business. Life is busy and it seems that regardless of the season I am in, I am always running short of this most valuable thing….time.
As landscapers, I think we develop a very deep connection with the natural cycling of nature, which ultimately is kind of how the whole concept of time came to be. The recording of the cycles of the moon, sun and celestial bodies is the basis for our whole clock/calendar. Working outside all day, I think we become very in tune with the passing of time. Our skin feels the intensity of the sun and we notice the slight changes in temperature as the day progresses and then winds down again. This time of the year I am very aware of how quickly time seems to be passing as our daylight hours diminish at what seems to be an accelerating pace!
As the time change approaches I started to really think about the impact of the passing of hours on our lives. How this thing/concept rules over so much of our modern life and what really is it all about? Just a quick google search of the word ‘time’ took me down a rabbit hole of mind bending and fascinating information. Wikipedia defines time as “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.” But then there is so much more to it. There are those who believe time is a thing we move through and those who believe it is only a construct of our own minds. Crazy theories that maybe aren’t so crazy? From Aristotle to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, there are so many great minds that have written on the topic that there is no way to ‘sum up’.
Time waits for no man (or woman)
Time heals all wounds
Time is money
We obsess about it constantly. “Where does the time go? I just don’t have time! What time is it? This is a waste of time!” We seem to more and more be living like Alice’s white rabbit, constantly checking our phones and running late in our over-scheduled days. I definitely have many days that I feel like a half crazed, muttering animal. Maybe more than I’d like to admit.
I’ll admit to this though, the fall season comes to me always with more time pressure. While spring and summer landscaping have their own time pressures, the fall is different and honestly, a little more stressful. The difference is that we don’t know how much time we have. We have to book work based on a pattern of past experiences and hope for the best! We can no longer work outside from 7am-7pm because of daylight hours and the weather can shut us down pretty quickly if it turns snowy. We try our best to guess how much we can do and when in an undetermined number of days and each of those days I can hear the relentless ticking of a clock in the back of my mind.
24 hours, 7 days, 52 weeks. But here we are trying to cram as much as we can into an undetermined amount of time. Can you hear the ticking of the clock in your own life? Maybe we need to put down the phone and turn of that tic-tock…I think to calm the stress of life we need to have more of those moments that are just here and now today. Moments when time seems to slow and you just take in the life around you. We need to ignore the memory of past and the anticipation of future and be here because we don’t know how much time we have.
“How did it get so late so soon? Its night before
Its afternoon. December is here before its June.
My goodness how the time has flewn. How did
it get so late so soon?”
Dr.Suess
