TIME - what's your relationship with it?
As ‘that red line’ appeared 2.5 weeks ago on the dreaded plastic test, two things passed through my mind:
1. Gawd, how is covid still a thing?
2. Ok (after some feeling sorry for myself) 'here is a week to read, catch up and rest' - but then the pressure to use this time well (self imposed of course) crept in.
My daughter had gone off on holiday the day before and stretching ahead of me were two weeks of child free ‘time’ in August!! This thought of ‘making the best use of my time’ isn’t confined to being ill. It happens all the time to me – let’s just say it’s a theme, only magnified by the appearance of that red line, just not feeling very well and the pressure to ‘recover well’.
After a day of faffing around on my phone in a covid haze, feeling thoroughly fed up with myself that I couldn’t even ‘rest’ effectively with my brain whirring that fast, and my inability to watch an hour’s episode of ‘Your Home Made Perfect’ without 5 or 6 breaks, I deleted instagram off my phone and considered my next move.
Next to my bed a book called ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ by Oliver Burkeman had been laying there for a number of weeks. I’d made a brief effort to read it before, but I was very quickly agitated by the first paragraph stating four thousand weeks is the average number of weeks we all live and ‘how’ exactly are we best going to use our time during that period.
That thought in itself is enough for mild panic to set in and for me to snap the book shut. But really I knew something was calling me to read this book, since the nagging overwhelm I feel of never quite being on top of things and my (small?) productivity obsession could do with some kind of resolution.
Time is a real conundrum for us climbers. I know I’m not alone with this – it’s something many of the people I coach also question, along with many of my climbing friends. Climbing is not a time efficient sport. It just isn’t, certainly outdoor climbing isn’t. It’s not like going for a run around the block. Even going to the climbing wall takes a bit of time. There is that process during those first few climbs where we allow our minds to switch off the outside world and onto our climbing. That alone takes time. Then there is the whole theme of timescales and goal setting. And yes… to be good at climbing takes TIME (another blog perhaps, but in the same theme). Time is very wrapped up for us in our sport... and this productivity obsessed world.
I am the kind of person, who adds a task that I've just completed to my to-do list, just so I can get the tiny weeny thrill of crossing it out. I know this is entirely pointless, but still, just like the 6 month search during the pandemic to improve my morning routine (which resulted in buying an alarm clock instead of using my mobile phone) I’m often on the quest to find that place when I’m on top of whatever it is I feel like I need to be on top of.
Fortunately it only took a handful of pages of the book for this self confessed productivity geek to admit, after what seemed like his own lifetime of productivity hack exploration, that actually there are no hacks that actually work and that getting on top of the to-do list is an actually impossibility so why not accept defeat and go from there. Phew.
And so... I read on. On most pages I was raising my hand. ‘Guilty’. Guilty for wanting my to-do list clear. Guilty for wanting timescales to work on my terms (hello my difficulty redpointing longer projects and countless other longer projects I have on the go). Guilty for wanting to ‘use’ time as a resource and feeling like I own an idealised version of that future – cue perfectionism (hello my previous lean towards over training and under resting and the ongoing need to go easy on myself). Guilty for giving in to the various distractions we’re constantly pounded with. I don’t think I’m alone on any of this!
But oh it validated the struggle. The hustle. Even the pressure to ‘use’ our leisure time well. It even illustrated how society has come to demonise idleness (it didn’t use to). Yes - that busyness is the badge of honour. Except it just isn’t.
And then an observation: even after I deleted instagram and reduced the distractions, I noticed how agitated my brain actually was and that ‘resting’ and ‘recovering’ was proving to be an issue despite me sitting completely still. I should add that the last (and only) time I had covid (last summer) it came at a time when I felt I needed a break so it ‘fitted in with my timescales’ plus I felt it was time I joined in with the rest of society. This time it did not feel like that.
The book asked me to recognise and sit in the discomfort of that overwhelm – urgh I didn’t like it, especially combined with covid brain fog. This is that feeling that I normally over-ride by doing more jobs. There was the uncomfortable sense of how much I was not doing that week, how much I was letting others down and more than anything the frustration of not being able to sit at home in this longed for peace IN peace!! That two days was not easy!
But – I did it and broke through. I sat in that overwhelm and let it pass through me. I did no jobs, cancelled all my climbing plans, cancelled even more stuff (urgh the guilt) and finally ended up in that state of peace I was looking for and started to feel better all round (the covid took its time). It’s the present that counts, not the past or future.
“In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfilment to the future.”
Patience is not a passive experience. So this quote from the book sits pinned to my wall. And 1.5 weeks on from my re-entry into the world something of this mindset remains in me – like I did break through something quite big. Time will tell!!
I could go on in more detail about the book and the various ideas it explores. I do recommend it – but I’ll leave it to you to look it up if you like - if your relationship with time is tricky something may resonate.
So what is your relationship with time? How does this show up in your climbing? Do you fight to find the time to climb, or in fact make time for climbing yet arrive at your climbing day a bedraggled heap, the week’s demands still floating around your system? Do you have longer term climbing aims and projects, which you diligently work towards, or do you get weighed down by the feeling progress is too slow? Or do you go with time, accepting things just take the time they take and all will unfold in the natural order?