hurrying, worrying not anymore

I get some grief in my life because I sometimes go about my business in a fairly easy going manner. I tend to take my time and don’t often move with celerity. Don’t get me wrong I am respectful of other people’s time. I am rarely late and I am generally prepared for whatever I have scheduled.

I found myself some years ago living my life from minute to minute of sometimes even second to second. I found this to be a very stressful way to live. It caused me to think in a cluttered fashion and make mistakes that I otherwise wouldn’t make if I had taken my time . I also found that I was enjoying my life less and less as well.

I also discovered as I was thinking about these things that the more compressed my life got in regards to time the more my thinking became really just worrying. This alarmed me as worry was not a state I was accustomed to being in. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that hurrying and worrying go together. They feed off of each other and make each other stronger.

Worrying is really an expression of fear. A life full of fear is a life absent of love and joy. You may be able to mimic those things, put the paint of love over the walls of worry in your life but those walls are still there. You are still boxed in by the worry that fills your mind, your thinking is still skewed by fear.

So I was hurrying which led to worrying as an expression of fear in my life. It would take several more posts to explain just what the fear was and maybe one day I’ll get into that but for now let’s look to a solution. When I came to this realization my thoughts focused and my mind calmed. Living minute to minute or second to second is not a good of productive way to go about your affairs.

Why does your life even need to be so dominated by the clock anyways? Don’t get me wrong I understand the value of time as I stated earlier but the units of time individually are really unimportant. Each one is identical to the one before it. So I thought maybe there is a better way to measure your life than simply identical units one after the other relentlessly pushing forward without any consideration for you or anyone else. I decided that yes there is a better unit by which to measure ones life.

I decided that from that moment on I would no longer look at my life as a slave to the clock. Instead my life would be lived not minute to minute but from experience to experience. After all what is life but a series of experiences? Each experience is unique and therefore worthy of your complete attention. Every experience has value in it’s uniqueness no matter whether it is pleasant or not. Each experience is your own which makes it infinitely valuable and something to be cherished.

This perspective on life changed everything for me. Fear and worry were replaced with joy and love. Did my life suddenly become perfect? Hardly. The fear causing agents were still there and had to be dealt with but my mind became clear and my thinking became ordered. That trend continues to this day. Fear producing circumstances still occur and have to be faced but it is much easier now knowing that whatever it is is another experience to be learned from and then looked back to as a victory.

Are you filled today with fear, anxiety, and worry? Is you mind cluttered? Do you have difficulty making decisions? Are you hurrying through the minutes and seconds wondering where they all went?

If this is you I pray that you will get off the clock. I pray that you will cease to allow it to be your master. Order your life by experience. Look back and see that your life is not a sequence of time but a gathering of experience. I pray that you can see that your future is the same. Not an allotment of hours but a gift of uniqueness that is yours alone.