My Time

I was having one of those not-enough-hours-in-a-day days this week. A series of them actually – Monday through Wednesday to be exact – where I just wasn’t feeling like I was getting anything of purpose done. Where I’d look at the clock and it’d be 5 p.m. and nothing on my must-do creative list was crossed off. So frustrating.
Then yesterday, Thursday, I pulled one of the cards out of the deck that Alex gave me for my birthday – a deck of playing cards, each one with a word on it to serve as a mini canvas, one for each week of the year. 52 cards in a deck, 52 weeks in a year, 52 years of living under my belt. Here are a few images to give you the gist.
                            
The card I drew this week was ‘time‘. Hmmm…interesting given my state of mind, I said to myself as I set it aside to work on later.
Then right after that, like immediately I tell you, I was rifling through some file folders and stumbled upon an old collection of poetry I’d written. The first one I yanked out was dated March 1999 with the title: My Time. Here it is:

My Time

I try to stay ahead of it, then waste it, kill it

And try desperately to make more of it. 

I give it away as though it were infinite

Then marvel that there’s none left. 

I spend it ruminating and fantasizing and 

hanging on to that which is long gone. 

I fill it with joy and truth 

and it multiplies before my eyes. 

So yeah, there you go. PAY ATTENTION, ELLEN! There’s plenty of time to do the things I love to do – the creative, purposeful things – as long as I let go of this panicked worry that there isn’t enough juxtaposed with the belief that I can whittle it away mindlessly. An inner conflict that gets me to 5 p.m. feeling empty. 

Most days I’m in my flow. And by ‘flow’ I mean I pay close attention to time. Not in a control-freak sort of way, but in a mindful state of what-feels-right-to-do-next sort of way. I breathe, scan my written or mental list, FEEL what stirs my gut, and do that. Then when that’s done, I do it again – breathe, scan, feel, do. And again and again and again. It’s as close as I can come right now to defining what living in the present moment means to me.

As I wrote this post, I remembered a similar writing I did a few years ago – Insights on Balance. Perhaps I leave all of these little breadcrumb clues in the way of filed poems, blogs and birthday cards to find my way back to myself when needed. Very clever, Conscious Ellen.