Hello. My name is Ashley and I am punctually challenged.
Over the past few days I have been thinking a lot about the concept of time, running late and how there are moments in our life that can pass us by so quickly; where we are unable to remember details of those moments, rather a blur of feelings and splices of memories intertwined. And on the other hand, there are moments that are branded into your conscious; able to relive them over and over again in your mind like some kind of long cinematic shot of your life, shown in perfect detail from your own point of view.
I am famously late. It would take an army of supporters for me to be on time. I am a casual walker, always opting for the scenic route as opposed to the direct route. I stall.
I don’t wear a watch.
I luxuriously enjoy the minutes I have before leaving my house.
I have an delusional concept of how long it takes to do things and I have convinced myself I can get anywhere in this city (or any city for that matter) in 25 minutes.
I have earned the title of being “fashionably” late by my friends and family; a title I definitely don’t embrace, but have accepted with humility.
In addition to being tardy, I take my sweet sweet time in making big decisions too. Now I know at some point we are all advised by somebody who knows better than us to “not jump to conclusions” or “make hasty choices”, but I think I take this characteristic of thinking things through to a fault.
After stumbling on the blog of Dana Jennings who has been writing a very honest and raw documentation of his battle with prostate cancer, I became very enamored with a particular postwhere he wrote about how his sense of time affected his view on his recovery and altered his perception on how he should be feeling and what he should be doing while healing.
“In a culture where the micro-second has become a viable unit of time, one year seems to be an eternity nowadays. We are addicted to the idea of instant closure, have knuckled under to the myth that media time is real time. But biological time, that unerring clock whirring at the cellular level, still has plenty to teach us.”
This got me thinking about my tardiness=decison-making issues and I have come to the conclusion that in our modern culture, we are rendered to go as fast as we can; to check as much off the to-do list as possible and deal with all of our situations or problems with as much efficiency and expedience as human-version-2.0. We like to pretend or forget that we are organic creatures, as Jennings made it clear to me. We have a natural process that can’t be hustled or forced. No amount of will power can accelerate the organic process of where you want to be.
Another point Jennings made that grabbed my attention was that time is a commodity. You have to decide how you want to spend it. My time dictates my life. Every minute I spend stalling or in oscillation should not be dually absorbed with rushing myself onwards to the next minute, rather, I should enjoy the exhilaration I feel when running down bank street in platforms, or when darting to appointments or that anxiety that comes when forced with a dilemma.
Albeit, I want to improve my tardiness, but as I am furiously typing this post while already running 10 minutes late for a meeting, some things may never change.
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