“An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth” –Bonnie Friedman
Going through cancer and now in the middle of my life, I recognized how precious time is Hopefully not too late. It is our most important asset and one that is finite and cannot be bought. If you have read my other posts about when I was in the hospital dying, I prayed only for more time. Not money, not love, or anything else in the world. This surprised me more than it should have.
I would guess most people close to death would pray to escape it, but at the core, what they are all really wishing for is more time. What they want the time for might vary, but at the end of the day, we all want more of it.
If we were to be justified in the greed for anything, I suppose that it would be the greed of time. I try to live with the goal of hoarding as much time as I have and spending it as wisely as possible doing the things that make me happy, with the people who are most important to me. I am building an invisible mansion of time. Admittedly, I fall short of my own goal, and even after my experience, I am still guilty of waste. The good news is I am now more conscious of it and I hope you can learn to be too.
With my new lease on life and my introspection on the value of time, I have read some interesting things. Eventually, I will be posting a book list on my blog and update it from time to time, but because I value my time so much now you will have to wait 🙂
One of the things I read was The Time Paradox, by Philip Zimbardo.
In it, he says there are 6 potential time perspectives and we all lean towards one or two more than the others.
The 6, in no particular order, are…
Past-Negative
Past-Positive
Present-Fatalistic
Present-Hedonistic
Future
Transcendental Future
This is not to say that you can’t have contradicting perspectives on different issues and subjects. For example, you could be “past-positive” which would imply that the memories of your past are mostly positive and you think fondly of it. At the same time, you, of course, would have negative memories of your past, like anyone else. However, your overall perception of the past is still positive. This holds true for all the time perspectives listed below.
Like other personality tests they aren’t exact, but there is an unofficial test you can take that will give you grades in each and see in which direction you lean. While I can’t swear by the full accuracy, I think once you take the test you will agree that it is more right than it is wrong about your relationship with time.
You can find the test and be scored here: https://www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo-time-perspective-inventory/
Why even care about our relationship with time?
How we view time corresponds to how we view a lot of other things. At the most basic level, you can easily imagine just how people choose to spend their time based on how much they think they have left of it. We can all agree that aged or sick people are much more protective of how much they have left vs a 4-year-old with no real sense of the end of his/her time.
Not to oversimplify, but someone with a “past-positive” orientation (which would seem ideal for many) may be stuck in their ways and afraid of change. Someone who is primarily “present-hedonistic”, might be more prone to impulse, drug use, and frivolous money management, whereas someone leaning too much into a future perspective might be tight with money or never truly enjoy the present. The point here is that there are positives and negatives to all-time perspectives which is why having an idea of your own is invaluable.
Once you get to better understand your relationship with time, you may see areas where you need to be more future-oriented, and others where you need to be more present-focused. More importantly you can see the benefit of knowing how your partners or lovers are aligned with your time perspectives. We have all been in relationships where we may have cared about the other person but our perspectives were not aligned. I guess this goes for any perspective, but it is most important when it pertains to time (which after all is the most priceless of all our gifts).
How many of us have a push-pull relationship where we don’t seem to be on the same page about what to do today vs tomorrow? When to sacrifice, and when to relax? When to save and when to spend? The list goes on and on.
A standard theme to all my posts seems to be “I wish I knew then, what I know now”, but my new perspective on time (amongst other things) would have greatly changed some of my past relationship choices. The positive take here is that having a better understanding of myself, gives me hope for having success going forward, in an area of my life where there has been much obvious failure.
There are many benefits to:
A. Identifying that you DO have a unique relationship with time and …
B. Understanding what that relationship looks like and how it affects your decisions, actions, and relationships.
From there, we can grow more into having a more well-rounded perspective of where we live in the present while being careful stewards of our futures.
If you take the test, let me know how you did and I will share my results with you.
As always, feel free to contact me to discuss how to change your mindset or perspective on time and/or life!
