“Time flies!”
“I lost track of time.”
“I don’t know where time went.”
These are common phrases we use on a regular basis. Time is relative, and how we experience it depends on our connection to what we’re doing with it. Yet, some interesting answers or maybe even questions arise when we explore what we mean when we use any of these phrases.
What are we actually doing with time? How are we spending our days? Many may answer with factual stuff like “I went to work”, “I did my laundry”, “I studied”, “I went out with friends”, but when we dig even deeper and ask ourselves what really happened—meaning how did we actually experience those random and seemingly mundane tasks and routine activities—many of us may blank out and even get confused. What does asking ourselves these questions even mean?
You see, these questions are directing us to reflect on our internal experience instead of just looking at and stating our external affairs. You may have just gone to work the whole day on a Monday, but how was that for you? Was it stressful? Was it fulfilling? Was it exciting? And however it may be, why and how did those emotions come up physically or thoughtfully?
So many of us go through our days like this, and these kinds of days would sometimes stretch into our whole life, and one day we’re left wondering what we did with all that time.
This disconnection with time and how it affects our connection with ourselves is very much normalized in our society today, especially with the rise of hustle-culture, normalizing and perhaps even glamorizing being overworked and burnt-out, naturally dismissing our traumas along the way.
We are naturally drawn to ignoring our pain and our own disconnection from within, and this hurrying world is perfectly designed to disconnect us even more from our opportunities for healing and thriving. We might just wake up one day feeling some aches in our bodies, being depressed, feeling deeply isolated, and we would easily feel stuck because we couldn’t even understand and trace where these feelings or body sensations come from.
One prevention and healing tool is to start slowing down now. Trauma healing, when we think about it, is really the simple act of being present with ourselves as we experience life as it is, whether we are experiencing something positive or something unpleasant and difficult. When we slow down, we allow ourselves to go back to kindness as well, something essential in our healing journey.
Because trauma is about disconnect, the counteraction is centered on connection, such as repairing our relationship with time. This can look like being intentional with how we spend time and being mindful of our internal and emotional experience as we do certain activities. Notice how you manage your schedule. Do you give as much importance to scheduling proper rest or breaks in between tasks? Take note of how your body feels when you are doing those tasks. Are your palms sweaty or is your neck stiff? How about when you’re fully rested or simply sitting doing nothing? Is your heartbeat okay, or does that make you feel anxious or guilty? When you do something that excites you, are you aware of how that feels like in your body too or how that excitement shows in your face?
These are certain things we can start incorporating into our daily lives. So next time, even when we say something so innate as “Oh, time just flew!”, we can actually give ourselves the honor of recalling how time didn’t just pass us by, but that we experienced it because we are present with ourselves, others, and what we are doing, and consistently embodying our natural emotional responses to what was happening as the clock ticks.