The Answer is Time
I have always struggled with patience when it comes to certain things. I want to hurry up and be at my destination when traveling, I sometimes struggle with wanting to speed read a book to get to the end and find out what happens to the character in turmoil or maybe get to the next book in the series or even just the next book on my shelf. I realized that for many of us we are always in a rush in our lives, whether in similar circumstances to what I described or even just in the process of living. I would wager all of us at one point in our lives wanted to hurry up and be a grown up, or graduate from high school so we could go off and find our own way. We would rather skip practice and just play the game or the concert, or hell just have a magic pill or something to make us lose weight to have the body we think is ideal. That, to my mind has only been worsened by the on-demand world we live in. We all now expect that if we order something it should be on our front steps at the latest, within two business days.
The problem with wanting to in essence fast-forward all the moments of our lives is all that we miss out on. If we look at the different examples I laid out above, there is so much that can do, experience, and accomplish in the moments we want to skip right past. When we quickly devour a book, we could miss a minor plot point, or an interaction that comes back up at a later point. There are so many core memories I have from the years after I first started wanting to be grown that ultimately influenced and informed who I became, and without them I can’t say I would be the version of me I am today. When we think of weight loss, often we hyperfocus on the end result, the goal weight or body type we are striving for (often in an unrealistic pursuit) but we lose sight of all that goes into making weight loss or physical changes a lasting pursuit. See, if we do not alter our relationship to food or to moving our body, we will wind up back where we started. If we skip that period early on where we have to start to learn and internalize the lessons that lead to sustainable change, we will not be able to sustain the changes. That is why we see so many people who wind up dieting for years without making any significant progress.
More than that, often when we hit a rough patch in our lives we want to hurry through it, like it is that one bad episode in a great season of your favorite tv show. It sure would be great to skip past the most harrowing moments of heartbreak or to be able to move on to where it just doesn’t hurt quite so much and maybe we are ready to love again. But our emotions are not light switches that can simply be moved to the “off” position related to someone who hurts us. We think it would be nice to be able to turn off those emotions so quickly and easily, but that becomes a slippery slope because if we could do that, when would we ever feel comfortable that someone telling us they love us actually meant it? The parts after the end of a relationship where it hurts the most often speak to us about the fact that we DID, and in those moments still do, love someone. That is where grief can come from too, the fact that someone has died does not erase our love for them but rather means that now the object of that feeling is more ethereal to us, but that feeling remains just as real.
The moments we think of as boring, mundane, or experiences as hurtful and painful are often the moments we can experience our most growth. I certainly never advocate for people to go and get their teeth kicked in emotionally speaking. However, how we approach life in the aftermath of something like that can have a significant impact on our future. We can recognize the patterns that led us to maybe a less than ideal choice in a partner, or we can see how we continue to find life as unfulfilling as ever despite every major purchase and attempt at creating fulfillment outside of ourselves. It is not comfortable to sit and look inward and the accountability we have to take over our lives there can cause a bit of an identity crisis, but with the right people in your life you can remain afloat. That critical self-exploration is where we uncover our truth, and as we begin to truly and genuinely understand ourselves, we can make more informed decisions about our lives that lead to actually feeling a sense of fulfillment rather than that empty feeling every prior experience has brought up. But the hard part is that takes time.
We want to make time work for us, but only when it serves us to escape something we do not want to have to go through. The old adage is that time heals all wounds, but I don’t know that truly holds. I think time lessens the hurts, but some wounds will leave a scar as a reminder of where we have been and what we have endured. Time remains unavoidable, it marches on, but if we can learn to make it an ally in our quest we can move forward and create more of a sense of meaning and fulfillment because we are existing in the moments, whether they are painful or not. If we choose to waste them, numbing ourselves and avoiding the heaviness of life we will also miss out on some of the beauty of life, hell maybe even some of the most wonderful moments that could come our way even on those days that feel especially dark. Some of the greatest things I currently have in my life came out of some of the heaviest and hardest experiences in my life. I would not want to go through those hurts again, but today I am grateful to those moments because of the things they have brought into my life. My wish for you is that you can learn to not fight time but learn to appreciate it.