In one of my favorite books of all time, East of Eden, the author details a scene with people impatiently waiting for a train that was about 2 minutes late. He describes how peculiar it is for human beings to live their lives in these small increments of time and how people nervously waited for the train that’s supposedly late when in fact minutes are no time at all. Our lives are measured in minutes and he wonders if one day, we’ll fret over fractions of a second.
It got me thinking about time recently, more importantly as it relates to my job. Since college, I’ve had 3 jobs, all of which I hated and I survived these jobs in chunks of time that were easy for me to digest. As the time increments shrunk, so did my existence in the world that surrounds me until I was so focused on time, I forgot to live.
The first job I lived in seasons. I coached myself through each season only to make it to the next season and coach myself some more. Each season was a hurdle to defeat and this systematic way of working this job distracted me from the big picture that illustrated my misery there.
The second job I lived in Months. Each new month was a fresh start and time for me to breathe. By the end of each month I had headaches daily and couldn’t sleep on Sunday night at the thought of returning on Monday. Every month I would grimace my way through the finish line desperately awaiting my monthly relief. Months made the years go by fast and I didn’t know how many years I could take it.
The third job I live in weeks. Every day I tell myself “Just make it to Friday.” If I can make it to Friday, I’ve completed one week and I can deflate just enough to have the energy for another round on Monday. This job is my nightmare realized because I never wanted to be a person that looked forward to Friday.
It was funny to me when I realized that I’m living my work life in smaller and smaller increments. I noticed how this focus on something as small as weeks mirrored my focus in my life. Suddenly my world expanded around things I used to find insignificant and shrunk around things I used to find important.
Lunch breaks. They’re big things now, like mini vacations or checkpoints if you will. Snacks have substance behind them like time markers for how much of the day is left. Each day of the week is one less day ahead and time is a battle to be won every day; the more time I waste, the more relieved I become. Small talk is big. It’s a welcome and comforting breath of fresh air to connect with someone and even though I know it’s empty, I hold on to it as though it were real. My thoughts are loud and desperate – they rattle in my head and sometimes scream in frustration. I always knew my thoughts were repetitive and mostly useless, mainly because that’s what I’ve been told, but I never knew the extent of it. Duplicate poisonous thoughts are stuck in my head like a bad song. I used to be able to concentrate in spite of my feelings, but all the noise makes it a daunting task.
My future. It feels like ‘later.’ The kind of later you tell yourself when you’re exhausted. I’ll get to it later, I say. Maybe it’s because all I can think about is making it to Friday. Sleep is looming. As the night wears on, I’m slowly dragging back into hell the next day. I wish it would stay 7pm for 3 more hours so I can sit and stare heavily. Nights always go by too fast and before I know it, I’m up again and painfully hauling out of my bed.
This is how we get to unhappy places. This is life 15 years or so before the brewing midlife crisis bubbles over. Slowly but surely making our lives smaller and bigger at the same time, flipping it inside out like a funhouse mirror – our existence so distorted we don’t even recognize it anymore.
This kind of thinking happens discreetly so it’s a tricky habit to catch, but we can only take control if we take notice. Sure, I can resent my job, agonize over something as insignificant as time and let that seep it’s way into everything else in my life – that would be easy. I could also live according to my values and not based on the circumstances handed to me by an employer or a clock. I could flip the funhouse mirror back to normal.
I can chose to make the important things important again: my future, sleep, family, hobbies. I can live in the bigger picture: months, seasons, years, and maybe even a lifetime because time doesn’t really exist anyways. Instead of allowing time to guide my life I can choose to live for moments that are so grand, they reverberate beyond their own lifespans; moments that are so real, we relive them through our memories.
And it’s these moments, good and bad, that truly make up the story of our lives.