Slow Down: Life is Not a Race

My name is Tim, and I’m addicted totime.

I’m so freaking impatient I take thestairs instead of the escalator because I can’t stand for 10.5 seconds insilence. I’m not sure what I did with this 10.5 seconds I gained back, but mostlikely I wasted it on one of those messenger apps.

While I don’t believe that we shouldwaste time, I do believe we shouldn’t become obsessed with it. 

Time is more important than money. It’s theclock that never stops and it will end one day.

With that said, we can’t keep beingobsessed with time. This obsession has become a disease for the new breed ofhigh achievers. All this motivational content we can now consume makes us feellike we have to achieve so much more than we really do.

Ourreality sabotages us

Our life feels like a race becausewe look at what everyone else is doing and then compare it with our ownresults. When I look at my friends I see:

– They’re married
– They own a house (or two)
– They have kids
– They have perhaps found their dream job
– They’re very fit
– They have more followers than me

Who says that this is what success looks like? Who puts a timelineon when or even why you need to do all of these things?

One of my friends told me the otherday that he doesn’t want kids. I thought it was odd until I saw how happy hewas with knowing what he wants. All of our success is different.

Certainty

I once dated this girl who alwayshad to be certain. She told me that she needed to be certain about: marriage,kids, owning a house, investments, holidays, etc. I thought about this for awhile and realized that it’s impossible to guarantee anything in life.

Just last week, this idea came upagain. I was reading this book called “Tiny Beautiful Things.” The book is acollection of letters to a writer called “Sugar.”

Sugar posts each letter on heronline column and then posts the response to the question in the letter. Thequestions range from how to: deal with: divorce, children, cheating, pregnancy,miscarriage, rape and almost any challenge you could think of in life.

After reading all the letters, I sawa familiar pattern: there are no guarantees. You have to be prepared thattragedy or pain could strike at any time. The problem each of the authors ofthese letters suffered from was that they thought once you have a plan inplace, nothing gets in the way.

Once you’re married, supposedlyyou’re secure. Yet, what I’ve learned is that security is a myth.

“You have to live with theconfidence that anything could happen at any time and that you have the powerto overcome any adversity”

If you don’t live with that power,then when life knocks you flat on your ass, you’re going to experience extremepain. That could then be followed by drugs, alcohol, out of control sex (thebad kind), mental illness, sickness and unemployment.

Yourtimeline is a myth, sorry

So if we have no real certainty thenhow does that affect how we think about time? It means that the race we thinkof as life, with all of these time indicators, is a total myth! If we take it astep further, it means that your timeline for this whole achievement race is awaste.

When you think you are fallingbehind because of a setback, at another point in time, you will catch up andprogress one hundred miles in front of where you thought you would be. Therewill be moments of massive momentum, and then moments of incredible failure.It’s all gravy.

Whatyou think you want, you don’t

You’re running this race againsttime because of the things you think you want. Someone said something to me theother day that was profound. They said:

“Tim, single people want to bemarried, and married people want to be single.”

We’re always chasing the next sunsetbecause we think that’s what we want.When we finally get it, we want the opposite. It’s easy to obsess oversomething you don’t have. It’s not hard to feel like you’ve been lazy with yourtime.

The truth is your wants will changeand so will the timeline. Embrace this uncertainty and know that surprises arefun. Life is going to throw things at you and that’s what makes it worthliving.

“Reading the same story over andover, when you know the ending, is boring. Life is the same”

Slowdown

The point of this post is that youare racing ahead trying to win a race that doesn’t exist. So now that we knowthis race is a myth, we can slow down.

By slowing down, we can enjoy wherewe are right now. We can be happy with all the things we’ve accomplishedrather than dwelling on what we think we should have already completed. Byslowing down, we get to be truly happy again.

We can sit by the beach and watch asunset. We can hang out with friends and be fully present without a phone insight. We can eat an incredible meal and enjoy every bite. Why can we slow downand do these things? Because we’ve quit the race we thought we were running.

By seeing the truth, we’ve createdpossibility in our lives. We’ve become open to whatever life throws at us andwe’re equipped to deal with the different seasons of life. I’m sitting heredrinking Chinese tea right now and it tastes delicious. I’m enjoying it becausetoday I’ve decided to slow down.

I’ve decided to quit the race, andenjoy myself instead. I’ve decided to see things differently and I encourageyou to do the same.

Written By Tim Denning