Photo by Pko.
Open your eyes and let’s see time from a different angle!
—Dogen Zenji, in Shobogenzo Uji
I often walk on a local track in the early mornings. Usually, I’m out there with a flock of foraging crows or seagulls and a mix of runners in a wide age range, from teens and young adults to older adults, many wearing colorful marathon t-shirts. On this past Saturday morning, I was walking the track behind a mother and young son (I’m guessing he was about 7 or 8). The mother was talking with her son about the upcoming week.
Through the conversation, she was helping him extend his mind into the future to imagine the week ahead, and what might happen on each particular day. As they passed by me, they were talking about which days would be good to take his musical instrument. I really appreciated overhearing this very back and forth casual conversation about time.
Time. How are you living it? What are the metaphors you use in thinking about time in your inner dialogue? How do you talk about time with others? And in particular, how do you talk about time with your children, tweens, or teens?
In my weekly sessions with young people, we talk about time a lot. Like the mother with her son, we walk through time, reflecting on the week past, and imagining the weeks and days ahead, balancing must-dos with want-to-dos. We talk about longer term aspirations. I like to call this process Time Design and I emphasize how essential it is to set aside time to consider and consciously design our time. Often we’ll map time visually. We’ll create prototype designs for the week and run them as experiments. Then we’ll review how those prototypes worked, we’ll troubleshoot where the design didn’t work as intended, and we’ll iterate a new set of experiments to run.
I believe Time Design is a critical skill for Mindful Digital Life. Make time a regular topic in your family conversations. From a non-judgmental and curious mindset, explore how you’re living in time. Are you or your family members feeling rushed a lot? Are you “losing track of time”? Are you frequently “too busy” to (fill in the blank)? Are you putting off x, y, z until you have some “spare time”? And make sure to include in the conversation when you’ve been having “a great time” or moments when you’ve been having “the time of your life”—what was happening?
Let’s Connect!
Would you like to explore more deeply the role of Time Design in living a mindful digital life? What are the time stories you’re telling yourself? How are your kids experiencing time? What situations challenge you the most? Let’s talk. Respond to this post here and I’ll get a 1:1 30-minute video conversation on the calendar with the first three people to drop me a line. I look forward to hearing from you. And thanks so much for reading.
