Take Your Time

“Take your time, Deadra,” my massage therapist said, just as she finished undoing the tension I held in my shoulders and jaw.   Her words startled me – nobody else was saying anything like that to me at the time.  When she told me that she was leaving the room, she added that I didn’t have to rush.

“Take your time.”  What an amazing invitation; a gift, really.  It was the prompt I needed to move much more slowly than I usually did – to savor that moment.

In those days I was a single parent with a demanding job, living in a densely populated area. It seemed that I was constantly being pushed from one thing to the next, whether that was keeping up with my children’s busy schedules, or reaching for the next fundraising goal at work, or navigating congested traffic.  Rushing from one thing to another was just part of the fabric of my life.

It seemed that I was constantly being asked to meet the demands of other people’s schedules on their timetables.  Nobody was urging me to take my time.

When I’ve tried recall prior instances when someone said to me, “Take your time,” the words seem to be more an admonishment than an invitation.  I hear them coming from my father as he tried to settle the rambunctious child that I was, or a teacher warning against rushing through an assignment and getting it wrong.

I can’t recall an employer encouraging me to take my time.  Can you? Generally, the attitude is that “time is money” and the faster you move, the more money you can make for the organization.  Meet your goal and you will be rewarded with a new higher and harder to reach goal.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that time is something to be budgeted, managed, carefully spent.  We tend to believe that it’s limited and moves far too quickly.

When I was in seminary, I learned that there are two Greek words that can be translated as “time:” chronos and kairos. Chronos marks the passage of time and seems move in a linear way.  It’s what we understand as chronology.

But the latter, kairos, is anything but linear.  Kairos is used to convey the sense of the opportune time, the fullness of time – or even time that’s beyond time.  It can’t be measured in any of our conventional ways.

Admittedly, I’m stretching the definition of the word, but I’ve come to believe that to experience kairos is to live fully in the present moment.  It’s the opposite of living hours, days, or weeks into the future, fretting and stewing about what might or might not happen next, and rushing to get there.  Because, in the end, the present is the only time we have.  What matters most is what we do with it right now.

So, I happily accepted my therapist’s invitation, and I took my time.  I moved more slowly than I might have otherwise.  I savored the space I was in.  I allowed my body to remain relax.  I didn’t worry about what the clock said.

It’s true that I arrived home later than I might have if I been trying to keep up with the clock – but only by a few minutes.  Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that having sacrificed those few minutes to move at my own pace, taking my own time, has adversely affected my life.

Best of all, when I entered the house, I was relaxed and calm, ready to make the shift to enjoying the opportunity to just be with my family.

 

Photo by Chuck Ashton