The clock. The tick tocks of the clock.
Be there at eight. Be done by three. How long will this go? Why can't I know how long this will take? Do I have time blindness?
What if this so-called time blindness is less about being unaware and more that our own experience of time takes prominence? So much of our modern society runs on these external measures of time.
Of course, it does. We have to share our existence. We have to meet in places, present our deliverables. But how much gets lost when we ignore our own experience of time?
The time within ourselves
While the clock does its thing, measuring our days by the seconds and the hours, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice losing sight of the time within ourselves. The afternoon, the evening, the time before lunch, the walk from here to there, the time to remember a song, the time of being.
Considering our own time isn't a selfish act, it's an act of self-reflection, and when we do it, we start to guide ourselves and gauge better, and sometimes even sync with the world's clocks better if we decide to.
I find three foundational rhythms that I want to call attention to. One is the breath, second is the session, and the third is the day.
Each of these are foundational because they rest in our experience.
The breath
So first, the breath. It's useful as a measure for a pause. When we can pause, which may be the most difficult of all the productivity exercises there are, we reach a higher state of agency. Agency is this skill of deciding and engaging non-reactively.
It's where we can make our decisions with our greatest sense of meaning. When we can pause, we're able to connect with those things that resonate with us more deeply. That connects with what we care for, how we play, which in turn help us guide our moments, our days into mastery and meaningful work.
The session
A second foundational fundamental rhythm of time is the session. This is the time in which our attention aligns with some intention, even if our intention is just to think about something for a moment. Every time we align our attention with an intention, we create a wave of focus. It might be disrupted, it might be rough, it might be smooth, but each one of these waves has a beginning, middle, and end.
The most experiential way to practice this is to recognize the power of a visit. You know, listen to episode four for a deeper dive on it. But for here and now, the idea is that we approach, we reach this edge of action. We pause at some work in front of us to feel whatever is at risk, whatever we are feeling we might lose, or whatever frustration is there.
We expose ourselves to the emotions of the work and hear what they have to say. And then as needed, we can mount the bravery and care that it takes to engage. At any time beyond, we can let go, whether it's done or not.
A second, a minute, an hour, these have no feeling. But an experienced time, the moment of a breath and its pause, the flow of a thought and action in their own times, those we can pay attention to.
We can feel the beginnings, the middles, and the ends. The beginning is where we approach. It's where we can get thrown off, how emotion might have us avoid something, how we might inadvertently defend against something. The middle, while we're in it, we might feel confused, overwhelmed, bored, angry, anxious.
We could feel excited, excited about something else entirely, and the daydreams that pull us out. And then there's the ending, the transition out. Whether we're done or not, that dreaded hyperfocus or exhaustion or just dropping it and discovering later, "Oh, I didn't finish that." Or maybe the rare, "Oh, I'm done."
Across all three, anchoring can always help. Check out episode fifty-seven for a deeper dive there. But for now, know that you can always grab a pen and paper and write down the thoughts that are on your mind and decide which one you wanna be with. Anchoring itself becomes this moment in time.
The day
And then there's the third, which is the day.
Many of us keep some form of daily to-do list. We think about our habits. We wake up, hopefully every day, until one day we don't. Which, on reflection, points to a fourth cycle, the life itself, momentary or a hundred years, or either way, a single unit. But I guess that's tangent to these three. Back to the day.
If we can visit something and not finish it, that idea that we can step away before it's done and still want to come back, well then, what do we do? We can invite our future self into the next day. Hey, future you, somewhere between waking and sleeping, can you make a visit to this?
That person now has the whole cycle of the day to honor that self who sent the invitation, to then mount the courage to pay the visit, to expose themselves to the emotions of the work, and to make their own decision.
Maybe even to extend yet another invitation to that next future you down the line. Using the experienced time of the day, we practice building a trust with ourselves, a sense that something will keep doing what it's been doing so we can rely on it. In this case, ourselves. Meanwhile, we distance ourselves from alarms artificially bolted onto the mechanical clock, designed to interrupt us wherever we are.
Alarms do their job. They disrupt whatever wave we're in. But that's irritating, and I like to avoid it when I can.
So that rhythm that we return to something perhaps every day can become a current, a stream, this river of trust that's formed of three parts: the honor for the self who gave us the invitation by showing up to it; the respect for the present self by deciding from that deep breath, from that place of, "I've been here"; and the care for our future selves by asking them to return tomorrow for another invitation if we want to.
These are three fundamental cycles: the breath, the session, the day. We all share them, ADHD or not, neurodivergent or neurotypical. It's just that for some of us, they run choppy and hard to navigate, and sometimes our zoomed-in view makes the waves loom so large we lose sight of everything else. But that's another story.
The takeaway
Meanwhile, as a takeaway, may be that somehow you're feeling time blind. May be that your time hasn't yet found some harmony with the hands of a clock.
But what if there's some way to begin practicing that harmony? What if you picked up one thing and invited your future self to visit it sometime tomorrow, sometime between waking and sleeping? It's not something you'd have to finish. You don't even have to do anything once you're there. That single deep breath counts.
May not be easy, but there is a simplicity to it. And if you can do that, and then do it again, well, now you've got two beats. And in two beats, you have a rhythm.
Music — Feet on Pebbles in Water
Music's an art form whose very medium is time. And you may notice that it too doesn't necessarily connect with a clock. While there is a metronome, there's other ways of ar-arranging notes to, to music.
Chopin's tempo rubato, this expanding and shrinking of, of the, time and the speed of the way, we play the notes, translates literally as "stolen time."
When I play a series of quarter notes, then a series of half notes, I can tell something's shifted. It doesn't just feel longer, it feels larger, grander. And if I shift to whole notes, it can feel larger still. Yet the quarter notes and the half notes that came before simply are.
There's a relativity of time. It's not just one against the other. It seems to give time its very definition, the experience of time itself. The piece I play in this week's episode is called Feet on Pebbles in Water, and I hope you enjoy it.
Tune in to this week's Rhythms of Focus S01 Episode 68 - What If You're Not Time-Blind — Three Rhythms Beneath the Clock.
