Tag Archives: time

Old friends

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen each other for months or years, when you connect with long-time friends both time and distance melt away. There is no awkward silence, no getting up to speed, the friendship just moves forward as if it was just yesterday that you last connected.

I don’t have many friends like this, but I cherish the ones that I have. They are my family, just not by blood. As I get older, I value these connections more… Maybe because they happen less frequently, maybe because I see how precious such friendships are. Moments spent with good lifelong friends are moments that accumulate to keep life feeling rich and fulfilled.

The trick is not to wait for special events to get you together. Find opportunities to meet, to holiday, to connect for no other reason than to be together. Special events don’t happen often enough, and while distance and time may disappear when you connect weather it has been a short or long time apart, the longer apart you spend, the less time you’ll have together. So, make the time for the friends that matter.

Filling time

Ever find yourself filling time rather than spending it? You have a task to do and you have two hours to do it in, and you get it done in 2 hours. If you had 1.5 hours, that’s how long it would have taken… and if you had 2.5 hours you might get it done in just under 3. While that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I think it makes the point.

We recently hired a company to help us with tidying and organizing our garage and basement storage. We floundered over a couple weeks figuring out what to throw away and how to organize things. Then when we were getting help that was costing us more the longer it took, we transformed our garage. It went from a dumping ground that got out of hand when we had to throw everything in there for our main floor renovation, to a fully useable space with organized shelves and clear, labelled bins. We didn’t even need to add more shelving than what was already there.

If we had to keep going on our own without help, I think that we would still be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic – moving things around in a disorganized garage that still looked like a disaster.

That’s an example where outside help got us through what needed to be done, but some of this filling time issue is more personal. For example, I haven’t been getting my morning routine done every morning. Sometimes I get to my workout later in the day. When I’m not on summer break, I wake up at 5:15, I write, meditate, and work out and I’m usually in the shower by 7am or shortly thereafter. But now my writing could take an hour and I could head to the basement for a workout that’s usually 20 minutes cardio and 20-25 minutes of weights and stretching, and turn it into well over an hour. However, I’m not doing more, I’m just procrastinating and stretching the time. I’m distracted by my phone. I’m taking very long breaks between sets. I’m doing a 10 min cooldown on a 20 min ride on my stationary bike.

Sometimes I just stretch the time I spend on things just because the time is available. I’m not spending time doing things, I’m filling the time available. While it’s nice to have the time to be able to do this, it does feel like I’m just wasting time… and time is a limited resource. The question is, if I didn’t just use my ’empty’ time up, what would I spend it on?

Moments in the day

Do you ever go through a day where every moment seems like you are getting ready for another moment?

You aren’t doing a morning workout, you are starting your day off with exercise. You aren’t working, you are checking things off your ‘To Do’ list so that you can get to the next item. You aren’t enjoying a meal, you are eating on the go because it’s lunch time and you know that you need to eat.

Take a moment… breath deeply… more than once… be still.

Now plan a moment in your day that is about that moment and that moment only:

A long hug.

A walk outside.

A phone call with a loved one, or a good friend.

A delicious snack.

A favourite song played just a little too loud with headphones.

A moment to breathe, to meditate, to fully appreciate your surroundings.

Take a moment, rather than just letting moment after moment slip away.

Nothing and Everything

The earth has been around for 4.55 billion years. Homo sapiens for about 200,000 years.

200,000/4,550,000,000 *100= 0.0043956043956

Humans have only been on earth for 0.0044% of the earth’s history. Or if you look at the age of the one universe, 13.78 billion years, humans have only existed for 0.00144% of all time.

For a little more perspective, a single 100 year life is lived for only 0.00000073% of all time. Insignificant. Our lives are not even a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of the universe. Nothing.

Yet for us, it’s everything. It’s all we know. It’s all we have. It’s no wonder people want to believe in an afterlife… why, there simply has to be more… or so the thinking goes. But regardless of your beliefs, this life is unlikely to go past 100 years. Life is so short and fleeting. This begs the questions:

Are you passing time, or are you experiencing it?

Are you completing tasks or creating memories?

Are you treating life like it is nothing, or do you realize that, for you, it is everything?

Undoing the pandemic

It takes a long time to build a culture of a school community, and a relatively short time to undermine it. The pandemic has been a major dismantler of school culture.

Next year our Grade 12’s will only have had from September to March of their Grade 9 year in a normal pre-pandemic school. The new Grade 9’s will have experienced their last pre-pandemic school experience at the start of middle school in Grade 6.

So, next September instead of our Grade 9’s being invited into a new school culture that has been well established, they are entering a school culture that only the Grade 12’s have a vague memory of. They are entering a school culture designed by maintaining ever changing Covid-19 safety precautions.

Next school year will be a critical rebuilding year. This has a lot of promise if it’s done with thoughtful intentions. If next year starts with a ‘business as usual’ expectation, the post pandemic culture will feel more like the pandemic shaped the school. If the year starts with a sense of community building and fostering the culture you hope to see, the afterglow of the pandemic can fade rather quickly.

Cultures don’t rebuild themselves.

So what about your school do you miss? How do you get it back?

What about your school has changed positively? How do you keep these things?

What can you do to start rebuilding in June rather than waiting until September?

If these things aren’t talked about intentionally, if they are not shared by staff and students, the effects of the pandemic on your school culture might linger for a long time. Either intentionally build the culture, or accept what is built out of the ashes of a 2.5 year disruption to what your school culture used to be like. Because whatever your school culture was back in January of 2020 is highly unlikely to be rebuilt by itself in September of 2022.

We will never have time travel

I’m not a physicist and I don’t play one on the internet, but I believe that we will never have time travel. My premise is simple: if it was invented 50, 250, 500, or even 5,000 years from now, there is no way that the first time we’d ever discover someone from the future was 2022. Surely if it will ever be invented a time traveller would travel to somewhere in the past before us, and we don’t have evidence of that… so at no time in the future will a time machine be invented.

The only possibility that I see for a time machine to work is that we live in a multiverse and if a person did go back in time then they wouldn’t change our history, they would create another new history splitting the history we know and creating a new one that they know… and so in this case while I’d be wrong, you and I will never know.

In the future, if we don’t blow ourselves up and send the world back into the Stone Age, we’ll get closer and closer to traveling the speed of light. A very long time from now humans will visit other planets beyond our solar system. Those travellers will experience time differently than anyone who stays on earth. But while they will age less, they won’t be going back in time.

Time travel like H. G. Wells wrote about will never exist. It’s a fun thing to think about, but the reality is that if it ever was to be invented, we’d already know about it… we wouldn’t have to wait for some time in the future to learn about it.

Time dilation

Yesterday I experienced a bit of a time warp. My morning went a bit slow, both in my productivity and in how long it felt. After lunch it felt like everything was thrown my way, and I was constantly on my ‘to do’ list, which seemed to be filled with things that took longer than they should.

At one point a package arrived, and I thought I’d take a break and take it to the teacher who ordered it. When I passed my grade 9 classroom it was empty, and I wondered where they were? As I learned, they had left for home. I thought it was about 2:30 in the afternoon and it was actually 3:50. It was almost an hour and a half later than I thought!

I’m always amazed by experiences like this. How can one hour of busy work or fun disappear, and another hour of slow work or boredom feel like an eternity? Just like actual time dilation is about time being different based on relative velocity, it seems as though we can experience this based on the velocity of our thoughts relative to actual time.

I also wonder about how relative time is based on our age. Five years is half of a lifetime to a 10 year old, but just 1/11th of a lifetime for me. Does my perception of time change with age? Does the importance of events alter because of the relative time of the experience compared to how many more experiences the event is compared to?

And what makes a single day feel both short and long at the same time? It’s early April, and I already know that the school year will be ending before I realize it. I’ll be swept up in all the things that are coming up, like report cards and grad prep, and suddenly I’ll be saying goodbye to a whole group of students. On that journey I’ll have long and short days, but looking back at the end of June, I’ll think the days from now until then just breezed by.

It’s not just a day in time that dilates, but weeks, months, and years too. It just seems strange… We want to fill our time with activities and events that are enjoyable and thus tend to go by faster. So, we are literally speeding up our lives. But the alternative is to spend a perceptually longer life that is less busy and enjoyable. Is one of the goals of life to have it feel like it’s going too fast? Or is this just an outcome of a good life?

One cation I think this brings attention to is that if time is going to race by, we should at least do our best to make it joyful and not just busy. Because time can also race by when we are just busy, but to what end?

Ripples over time

Facebook reminded me that I just recently passed 14 years since moving from teaching to administration. My FB memory led me to reread this post, Ripples and Tidal Waves, which I wrote 2 weeks after my promotion. I had so many things that came together at that time, which led to me being a presenter at Alan November’s conference a couple years running. I was even toying with the idea to go and work for Alan. How different my life would be now if that was a wave I chose to ride!

Looking back to that point, I had no idea what was in store for me. Living in China for 2 years? Not even a consideration back then, but I did just that a year and a half later. Co-founding a public, inquiry based school? Not on the radar. The only thing I can say that was expected is that I’d still be blogging all these years later.

We never know how circumstances and decisions will end up rippling and leading us to different opportunities and challenges, but we are fortunate when we can look back to a point in our careers 14 years ago and think, “This has been a great journey I’ve been on!” From here, I have less than 1/2 this time until I retire, and so I’m left wondering what ripples lie before me? Retirement for me will not mean gardening or golfing, and I can’t sit still for too long, so in the next few years I need to look for the ripples that come my way… or I need to make them.

Tiny little moments

Some days slip bye and when you look back, it’s hard to say what you did to fill them. On those days I try to think of small yet special moments:

A laugh with colleagues.

A good conversation.

A delicious snack.

A kind gesture.

A selfish moment.

A selfless moment.

A single accomplishment.

It doesn’t have to be a big thing, it just has to be something that I can identify that made the day a good day.

When you read quotes about life, you read things like, “Life isn’t measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.” That sounds beautiful, but how many daily ‘take your breath away’ moments do you really live in your daily life?

No, life’s not just about the breathtakingly special moments… it’s about filling you life with, and appreciating, the tiny little moments that make life worth living.

Fast and slow

We are having a renovation done and it’s about to move a lot faster. When electrical and plumbing are happening, the changes are incrementally slow, but this week they will start the drywall, and then things will start to move really quickly, adding walls, cabinets, and flooring. Soon we won’t remember what things look like now.

Kids are the same. Day to day you don’t notice them growing up, then suddenly they are adults. Day to day they are just your kids, but blink and suddenly they are their own people, with their own relationships, and work. The transition was slow, but looking back it seems so fast.

When you are building a home, things move both fast and slow.