no timer on timing

Tags

chance, perfect timing, photos, quote, sleep, snooze, time, timing

As I have an early class today this morning everything is down to the perfect timing. After all I didn’t want to sacrifice those precious extra minutes of snoozing in my warm cozy bed.

So yesterday as I set the alarm I worked out how many minutes I needed for the different morning activities: getting dressed, brushing my teeth, breakfast, packing my school-bag (I’ve owned a lovely leather satchel since my first year in secondary school), make tea and walk to the bus-stop.

But when I woke up this morning I realized that perfect timing is something you really just can’t work out. Life is not an egg, that you can let boil till it is exactly the way you like it, in my case the white hard the yoke soft and creamy, but life is a little bit trickier than that. After all we can’t calculate the trips and bumps that we encounter on a day-to-day basis.

But while I was contemplating the matter of timing while sipping my tea I realized that it is exactly those minutes we can’t plan that make life exciting and interesting. Bumping into that cute guy on the bus could mean meeting your future partner, or sitting in traffic may end up with you having a life-changing idea,  meeting an old friend could give you that little bit of “friendly  gossip” that makes you smile or send a much needed compliment our way, and reading “just one more blog” may just make you happy, think or even give you exactly the information you were looking for.

So with all that said time is running out for me this morning and I need to get going and hope that timing is with me today. But as you can’t set the timer on timing, and you never know what the day will bring I will follow some unknown thinkers advice:

Don’t wait for the perfect timing, take the time and make it perfect

The World Time Clock in Berlin- different places different times.

last few days of Dublin

Tags

busy, Dublin, masters, stress, time

One, two, three – three full days left until I leave my home for the summer and I am starting to panic. Between the making lists of what to take and what to do I find that I all I want to do is curl up and read a book.

But since beaming hasn’t been invented yet and I don’t have staff to whip my the house into shape I will just have to bite the bullet and try and get everything done.

It isn’t so much the dread of packing for six weeks or the fact that I have to clean, which I hate, but that everyday life just keeps moving on, chewing up precious time. Today I am meeting my prof to talk about my masters, and I am truly dreading it as I am so behind, tomorrow I need to do some test editing for a really exciting job opportunity and then there is a meeting that I need to prepare for as it is about a project I will be working on while away.

As my stress levels rise the only thing that is keeping me sane is the fact that I know that while I only have three days left, it will also be over in three days too!

My 1960s wall-clock reminding me of what time I have left

Weekly Photo Challenge: Future

Tags

future, photography, photos, sandcastles, time, Weekly Photo Challenge, Weekly Photo Challenge: Future

The Future – hard to predict and impossible to know. Yet we all make plans and try and pave the way to something we long for, work towards or just plain want. And like its sibling, the Past, the further away from our Present the Future moves the harder to grasp it gets. We modify our Past with our memory, even change it at times without realising it, and we build our future in the hope it will come true. But like the sandcastles I found on the beach one day, our Future is fragile – can be washed away by the sea – but like the sand the castles are built of  our futures are plentiful and we can recreate new ones, as many as we can dream up

found sandcastles

time disappearing

Tags

disappering time, Dr Seuss, losing time, photography, photos, thoughts, time

Somehow today has been off – not sure why or what to do about it. Somehow time is just running out and I still haven’t gotten anything done. And it all started so well: I got up early, made myself some breakfast, had a cup of tea and then it happened – time disappeared.

I swear I have no idea where it went, nor how I lost it, but one minute I had hours stretching ahead of me ready to be filled and then suddenly, with no warning or indication whatsoever, time was gone and I had nothing to show for it. And the worst thing about it is that you can’t get lost time back – it just is gone for good.

Maybe I should just except that for some reason I have stepped into a timeless vortex and concentrate of getting out of it again. After all with so many things crowding my desk and deadlines looming I can’t afford a lost minute let alone hours. So while I keep pondering the question Dr Seuss asked before me – ‘How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon’ – I better get my butt into gear and be on time to lecture.

fragile time

Weekly Photo Challenge: Time

Tags

photos, potography, Rome, time, travel, Villa Borghese, Water clocks, Weekly Photo Challenge, Weekly Photo Challenge: Time

I don’t wear a watch, I haven’t since I was a teenager. For some reasons never quite worked for me, literally, they would either always decided to go too fast or too slow, or stop altogether – and wearing a watch that does show you the correct time is a bit of annoying.

So I have lived most of my life following my own time, and thankfully there are clocks everywhere to help out in those moments when I loose track of it. And I have to admit there is something quite liberating about not always knowing what time it is exactly.

The Water Clock in the Villa Borghese in Rome – by letting water flow out of the encased body of the clock time is measured. Water clocks were among the earliest chronometers that did not depend on the observation of celestial bodies, but since the flow of water is hard to control they can’t measure time accurately

timely wondering

Tags

being late, clocks, late, psychology, thoughts, time, wondering

This week I seem to have lost track of time and the days of the week have all blurred in to one. So somehow I just can’t help but wonder about time, structure and schedules.

Why is it that I often think I can get things done much quicker than I can? Why is it that I nearly always forget to calculate traveling time, making me permanently 10-15 minutes late, and always rushing? Why is it that I often struggle to just sit down and start- delaying myself with my procrastination? And why is it that when I think it’s time to go to bed I still find myself up and about an hour later?

Of course any psychologist could argue that maybe I enjoy the attention I get by arriving late, or maybe I am constantly seeking forgiveness, which I get when I  apologize for my tardiness. Or maybe I am a narcissist who just never considers other people and their needs.

However since every ‘pattern’ is based on what you get out of it, it really doesn’t explain why I (and others like me) inconvenience myself – the reward seems to be negated by the stress it causes. So what is it that makes me struggle with time?

As someone who chose a profession that deals with deadlines all the time it seems odd that this is an area of shortcomings. Even odder that I actually don’t struggle with deadlines – I tend to get my work done on time.

So, as I contemplated this contradictory conundrum I realised that maybe my issue with time has more to do with how I view it. I don’t wear a watch, and view time more through morning, noon and night, no exact hours more a sense of moments. And when I am working I get caught up with what I am doing – looking at word count or page layout or how many corrections I have left  – and this makes it easy to just plow on and get it done on time!

While this helps me in my job it also means that in my private time I forget about time too, I don’t check the clock and delay myself without meaning to. Of course this could also have something to do with a lack of self-discipline, enjoying myself in the moment to much to stop or feeling compelled to finish what I’m doing.

Or maybe I simply just don’t want to be early – I mean if being late is wasting someone else’s time, isn’t being early wasting mine?  Another thought that needs some timely wondering, but I don’t have time for that today!

flee(t)ing time

Tags

Benjamin Franklin, enjoyable time, fleeting time, quotes, time, time is money

I can’t believe it is already Thursday, somehow the days have all melted together leaving me with the sense of how fleeting time is.

It’s funny how time is so hard to grasp, an abstract construct that turns darkness into night, sunlight into days, structuring moments into measurable increments: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.

Yet somehow time has morphed into something else, it flees at will, slows down unwanted, is often too fleeting to grasp. And it is our most important resource, one that we can never replenish, one that each of us only has a limited amount of, while the exactly how much is unknown and unique to every individual.

“Time is Money”, we have all heard the saying, and it basically implies that we have put a value on time, and that making money is the most important one of them. But if we stick to that it would mean that time is only usefully spent (pun alert) when the result can be counted in our purse.

However I don’t think that is true, the time we spend doing things we enjoy is the most valuable time of all, and if what we enjoy doing is even useful, has a purpose, that is an added bonus.

For example, I love to read, so that is time well spent and since reading often has the wonderful side-effect of gaining knowledge, no matter how trivial, it is also useful. I enjoy writing, for pleasure and for work. Enjoyable and useful. I thoroughly enjoy catching up with friends over coffee or wine and since it deepens the relationships this isn’t only a pleasurable past time it is a useful one too. I adore to travel and since this also educates me, it is very useful as well.

So instead of putting a monetary value on the fleeting status of time I think we’d all be happier if we decided to enjoy the moments we are given and take the benefits of what we do as gifts.

Lost time is never found again.

Benjamin Franklin

 

too little time

Tags

Paul Gauguin, quote, quotes, stressed, time, too little time

Today I seem to be constantly running out of time. With so much to do and the hours hurrying away I am feeling a little stressed.

But as the time tingles away and my evening approaches quickly, I have to smile, as I have a few nice things planned before it’s time for bed. First coffee with a fellow writer friend, then an exhibition opening or two and finally a G&T in the pub.

As the minutes are moving away from me I need to tick a few things off my to-do-list and use the little time I have left efficiently. And since I have too little time today maybe I’ll find  a few extra moments over the weekend to catch my breath.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity

Artist Paul Gauguin

 

monday morning maneuvering

Tags

Albert Einstein, photography, photos, procrastination, quote, thoughts, time, times

A new day, a new week and a whole lot of things to do. This week is filling up fast as is my desk with notes, lists, reminders. And somewhere in all this chaos I will have to find time to tackle my manuscript, after all my own set deadline is approaching fast.

So while I sit and maneuver my hours and minutes of this week, trying to make time for everything I need and want to do, I can’t help but wonder about time and how fleeting it can be.

At the beginning of the summer I had a few months of empty space, unplanned freedom rolling out expansively before me and now, with about four weeks left until students and lecturing dominate my life once more, my time is becoming more and more valuable.

With time seemingly running faster I am reminded of something I once read. To paraphrase it basically said that we don’t have too little time to do everything, we just priorities according to our wants and needs.

This means that I need to shake up my priorities and make sure that I don’t get into that all to familiar pattern of letting myself be caught up with things that are less important but very time consuming. Here’s hoping I can stick to my guns, be realistic about my timekeeping and beat procrastination into submission. But thankfully I still have a little time and don’t need to do everything at one.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Albert Einstein

summing up the summer

Tags

42, bank balance, Berlin, daily chores, distant memory, divided by four, Douglas Adams, german capital, humdrum life, summer, summing up, time

With three weeks left until the new term begins summer is really coming to an end. The days are getting shorter and even though the weather is still warm and pleasant autumn is just around the corner.

When I look back over the past months I can’t believe how fast the summer has past by. I had so many plans and ideas about what I wanted to do, but somehow my clock and that of the season ticked at different speeds.

Berlin feels like a distant memory: meandering around the German capital snapping photos, sizzling in the heat and enjoying the thrill of the new all so long ago. But the five weeks of stepping away from normality helped me clear my head if not my schedule and even if I didn’t do all I had intended at the very least I had a chance to air out the attic of my mind.

But on my return my calendar was quickly filled with visitors and visits, catch-ups and chatter, parties and premiers but now I have to slow down, breath deep and try and get my routine back on track. And I need to not forget to carve out time to create beside all those daily chores.

I have to remember lessons I have learned,  the experiences I have gained and make sure I don’t lose them amongst the boxes and to-do-lists of my humdrum life. Maybe bring a little bit of Berlin to Dublin, mix up the capitals and create a cocktail to fit my heritage.

If I sum up my summer I think it was a success, more pros than cons and the have column is defiantly in the black. But with my bank balance tipping dangerously close towards the red I have to say the return of autumn also thankfully means the return of a regular income.

So if 60 seconds are in a minute, and the same amount of minutes to the hour adds up to 24 hours in a day, of which there are seven in a week, times four to create a month times twelve to get a year, divided by four to create a season can only mean that time is moving on and maybe Douglas Adams was right and the answer is 42.