Time is the most undefinable
yet paradoxical of things;
the past is gone,
the future is not come,
and the present becomes the past,
even while we attempt to define it.”
— Charles Caleb Colton
For years I have maintained this reflective habit. When given the gift of time (waiting in an airport or solo in a hotel) I chart my life on a timeline.
One way that I do it is to list the years starting with the year that I was born and bracket them into groups of five or ten years. Then I list my age for each year, where I was living, what I was doing, and as I age, what formative events were shaping my life. I try to remember the significant relationships of each year and a memory that I have from that time.
As I go through this exercise, I have an appreciation for the people in my life, the opportunities that I was given, and the chances and choices that I have made. Not all the significant events of my life have been positive or were joy-filled, but each has contributed to who I am today. It always humbles me and puts my current state into perspective.
• How would you fill your timeline?
In my younger years, I spent a lot of my time looking backward and revisiting actions. And the other portion of this valuable thing we call time I would spend visioning and dreaming about my future state. Rarely was I in the present.
During the pandemic, time has taken on many meanings for me. Time is precious, fleeting, fragile, and blurred. What adjectives would you use to describe time now?
At the age of 64, I have a hefty timeline to reflect on. Sometimes I segment it just for my career life starting when I stepped into the world of entrepreneurship and off any career ladder I was climbing.
In the early years of this risky venture, I counted the months and then the years. With each year gained, I celebrated beating the odds of small business failure. I like to think of starting a business as the best training boot camp a person could experience. If you didn’t learn from your mistakes the first time, it could be fatal.
Now — as I near my 40th year of self-employment — I bracket the years in decades when I think about my big lessons, decisions, and transformations.
My first decade of entrepreneurship was filled with youthful energy, luck, hard work, big lessons, naïve visions, and the creation of a foundation of relationships that enrich my life today.
My second decade included the writing and publishing of six books, weekly travel to clients and speeches, and a life consumed by work. I did not fulfill my dream of marriage and children. I learned that with success comes some sacrifice and ‘You can’t have it all.’ Yet, I wonder: “What would my life look like if I had done things differently?”
But, in those second ten years, I set and achieved goals. I traveled the world. I met totally cool people. I learned and grew — and am still learning and growing. I contributed to the success of others and helped to launch careers and companies. I am proud and happy with my storyline. In the third decade, I changed the way I worked. I discovered that in a rapidly changing world, one must constantly reinvent themselves to remain relevant.
I decided to let go of my offices in downtown Cleveland and the model of staffing that included a tribe of people to support the company. I had circled back to my earliest days of business and shrunk the company to myself and one other person and a place from which to work that had greater flexibility. (Who knew then that ten years later we would be working remotely and in a hybrid fashion?)
This change in my business structure created the space for the two most formative experiences of my life: rescuing a large, feral dog who we called “Big Boy” and — six months later — rescuing my mother from a locked dementia ward (she didn’t have dementia but was slowly dying from a failing heart). These commitments would have been seriously difficult to manage under my previous structure.
As things turned out, those changes were the biggest ones in my life — the hardest and best work with the greatest impact on everything and everyone. I would make those changes again, ten times over.
The experience of earning the trust of a large animal who had been beaten and abandoned was an act of becoming my best self. Providing my mother with a home setting in which to live the last year of her life was an act of love and respect that remains my guiding light into my 60s and what I believe will be the final decade of my career life.
I am no longer dreaming about what I will become and who I will be. Instead, I am living presently in who I am now. People in my life who are more senior always talk about how time speeds up as you age and they urge you to use your time wisely. I now know what they mean. I don’t waste my time struggling with the past. Instead, I refer to it to appreciate what I have, who I am, and how I evolved. I still love to vision but my time horizon is much shorter. I like to work the year ahead of me with goals and milestones.
Though I am not a big believer in the power of New Year’s resolutions, I have made a few this year. I have discovered with these decades of experience under my belt, that I can see the patterns of my behavior — some of which I am very proud of and grateful for, some of which I need to change. So my New Year’s resolutions are about letting go and making room for new ways of being.
• Are we not all just works in progress?
The week between the Christmas holiday and New Year’s presented the opportunity to visit my timelines and work decades. There is no going backward just forward into the world that is forming in front of me.
I am deeply grateful for all that I have experienced, shared, and learned. I am excited for what more is to come, both the challenges and positive events.I embrace the gray days of winter to incubate the adventures ahead of me and shoulder the responsibilities given to me.
I look forward to hearing about your use of time and who you are choosing to share it with. My most frequently spoken mantra is, “One day at a time.” Simple but true.
“Time is the most precious element of human existence.”
— Denis Waitley
Welcome to 2023!
Leslie
“Your time is limited,
so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is
living with the results of other people’s thinking.
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice.
And most important,
have the courage to follow
your heart and intuition.”
— Steve Jobs
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