Have you ever found yourself saying you don’t have enough time? I do, all the time and though I know it’s more of a mental perception than a real one, (if you’re saying ‘huh’ right now, bear with me, I’ll explain this) I still find myself making the comment that I don’t have enough time. In fact, many times the statement begins with, if I had enough time I would …
- … go back to school
- … finish that quilt
- … spend more time with my husband
- … read more books
- … finish more of my craft projects
- … get a head start on my gardening
You get the picture, I’m sure. The thing is, there is no such thing as enough time. Time is time. We have 60 minutes in every hour, 24 hours in every day and 7 days in every week. Time, like beauty, exists in the eye of the beholder. There are things we have to do every day and there are things we want to do and what we have to do is strike a balance between the two so that we can accomplish those things we need to accomplish and do the things we want to do.
How Do You Define Enough Time?
My husband and I have different definitions of enough time. I remember one night, we were coming home from somewhere and we needed to stop at the grocery store. He didn’t want to because it was going to take too much time and I told him it wouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes, tops. Grudgingly he stopped and let a friend of ours who was supposed to be meeting us at the house know where we were and that they should give us an hour because it would take that long and I corrected him and said we’d be home in 20 minutes.
He bet me 20 that I was wrong.
Fifteen minutes later as we pulled onto our street, he was handing over that twenty-dollar bill. It’s not that I’m better at estimating time than he is or that I knew the grocery store better – it’s just that my perception of the time spent was different. When we don’t want to do something or we are dreading doing something, our perception of the amount of time we’re going to spend on it is.
Time flies when we’re having fun, but it drags when we’re bored or disliking intensely what we have to do. I balance many of my days out by sprinkling out the things I don’t want to do in between all the things I do want to do. It’s amazing how much time you can find when you do it that way.
My husband and I have different ways of doing things and different ways of looking at them, but in this we’re pretty well matched and we balance that out – letting us each find more time for the other and for our family. Still, we do run into incidences where we think we don’t have enough time and it just takes the other a few minutes to point out the areas where we can make that time and we’re back on track once more.
How do you define enough time?
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