Time compression doesn’t fit me well. Yesterday I get hit and hit again and then yet again with a rapidly shrinking day. The first bit of bad news was school was closed. That meant the kids were going to be home and I have increased my Monday workflow in preparation to not come home that day as I had a 3:00 PM meeting.
All of a sudden the kids were home, Lara had a doctors appointment, and everything felt urgent. It needed to be taken care of and taken care of now. I realize now that my brain does a couple things in situations like this. It elevates everything to the level of emergency and the only acceptable timeline on emergencies is now. Everything must be solved now. There is no time horizon only time event horizon.
This was my mind frame yesterday and it made everything worse. As the world collapsed in on me and I tried to get through everything and get the day done, but I couldn’t because days don’t work like that. You can’t slow down or speed up time. Problems can’t be solved now. Impatience creates delays, not solutions.
Slowing down in something I am not good at. If my wife is a duck collector then I am a China shop collector. While Lara likes to get all the ducks in a row on our current pond and then go and borrow ducks from other ponds I like to charge madly into the future destroying everything in my path, only concerned with the next target.
This is where we both get along and disagree. We are like magnets in that way. If we align we compliment each other but if one or both of us turn the wrong way it is like oil and water, and that is what happened yesterday. I was misaligned, aimless, and irrational, and it led nowhere good.
David Huzzard Writes 