What is Time Well-Spent?

There are so many moments where I feel demoralized, exhausted and unappreciated.  So it is important that I recognize when I am feeling better about myself and the work.  It warrants some time and space also.

Today I am feeling grateful and honored that I get to do what I do.  It is such a unique opportunity to ask people individually in a safe and private setting how they are really doing and what they are grappling with in the moment.  It makes me realize how similar we all are, and how different.  And because I see people along the life span, from teenagers to patients in their 80s, I also get a variety of perspectives on present day issues and it deepens my understanding of the current times we live in.

And just because a patient is seeing me, it does not mean I am always in the supporting position, which is a surprise for me to say.  When I am drained, it is usually after a day where I feel there are unrealistic and extraordinary expectations placed on my shoulders and the intensity of a series of one on one interactions weighs me down.  But it is equally important if not more so to mention the patients from which I draw my strength and sustenance.  Take for example my 80 year old patient who recently lost his adult daughter to cancer.  When I commented on how stoic he appeared, he tells me how grief is not a stranger to him.  He is the youngest of 9 siblings and the sole surviving.  That kind of loss just stopped me in my tracks, but his acceptance and dignified movement through these losses was what moved me most. 

It is also remarkable how something that I am thinking about in my own life will come up in sessions with my patients.  Perhaps I unconsciously or consciously direct the conversation there, but recently the topic has been regarding rest and how we use our time.  One day, I saw a young woman who biked to the office.  She was lean and athletic.  She tells me about how she hopes to be a competitive swimmer and she will bike to the pool after this meeting.  She tells me how when she has free time, even if she is tired, she can only justify using the time to exercise.  She has physically collapsed before, and this is a reason she is seeing me, but in her youth and during the summer holidays, there is an ambition and testing of limits that exists before wisdom can settle in.  I am reminded of my bull-headedness at that age, and how I scoffed at those who suggested I should slow down. 

On this same day I saw a woman in her 60s, and recently diagnosed with heart failure.  Her energy gone, she struggles to accept her new way of being.  As someone who was always on the go, she is confused about how to use her time when she is too tired to be productive.  When we can resist screens and social media, what do we do in our down time?  I ask and examine this many times a day with different patients and it is a very common struggle.  Both of these patients of mine are in essence grappling with this question aren't they?  What is time well-spent?

I am smack in the middle of being 20 and 60 years of age.  I feel very tangibly, a change in my relationship with time. While I appreciate more than ever how finite the time I have is, I am losing the sense of urgency to constantly be filling and optimizing it.  In other words, the less time I have, the more I seem to be taking my time. 

In our 20s, we gobble up novelty and have an intense fear of missing out.  We are meeting new people, trying on new identities and being idle, at least for me, was the same as being restless, and I would have the sense I must be doing and experiencing more.  In my 40s, I am starting to grow wary of novelty.  I can’t help it!  I recognize patterns in the world and in people, such that I am not so easily convinced by idealism.  My sense of physical invincibility is waning and I will not take the risks I used to.  In my free time, I still struggle with what to do, but overall the current is calmer, I seek out solitude and silence. I do not know why only that stillness, in the cacophony of our current world, is like taking a long sip of ice water on a hot day. 

So perhaps I am grateful today because I am in between, and on a daily basis I have access to a time machine.  But it is a curious time machine where the date and time stay the same, and it is my age, and its corresponding perspective that changes.  It is a time machine that has given me the ability to see this world through the eyes of youth through to aged.  It has connected me to a healthy sense of my own insignificance.