Contemplating Time

For my entire life I have measured time by semesters.  Starting at Elementary school through High School, then, moving on to College straight through to Graduate school.  Then I worked in a profession that continued this, I worked for over 10 years and continued to measure my time by this.  Things like ‘winter break’, ‘finals,’ ‘end of semester/year closure’ were part of my everyday vernacular. 

Now here I am for the first time in my life and a semester holds a whole different meaning for me, or really holds no meaning at all.  A semester is coming to a close (3 months since I left my job) and I am not helping students prepare for finals, prepping for the next semester or pulling together ways for students to reflect on their semester.  I mentioned this odd place I feel like I have found myself in to one of my new retail colleagues and she said you must feel so free.  I had not thought of it as freeing, honestly I had thought of it as feeling lost.  But when she said that it made me think that yes this is actually another freeing moment in my journey.  This entire ‘unemployment’ (I put that in quotes because I guess technically I am working) thing has definitely at times felt quite freeing, though every now and then moments of hopelessness does rear its ugly head.  When I let myself, I do feel free, like the possibilities are endless, that this is a time to reinvent myself.  The problem is I am not sure I want to reinvent myself or to even know where to start when it is comes to looking at different careers.  Personally the freedom is amazing and I have done some great work on me and really am less stressed then I have felt in years.  Though sometimes I think about not feeling stressed and that makes me a little bit stressed!

So back to time; in the grand scheme of life only 3 months have passed.   Three years ago I spent 3 months traveling around the world (yes literally around the world).  So much can happen in three months yet it is such a small amount of time. Who knows what the next three months will hold for me.  Sometimes I wish I had a time machine that would let me know when things will unfold (because I know they will) and when I will know what my next steps will be.   What I do know is that if I focus too much on thinking of what is next I will lose touch with what is happening right now and there is a lot of good going on right now and really life is good.

“When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence.”

~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom