#53: spend your time chips wisely
your relationship with time is synonymous to your relationship with yourself
A special thank you to my roommate, Philipp, for composing an intro + outro for the audio version of this newsletter! Check out his new song, October, on Spotify. So grateful for you + the gift of your music.
Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here!
I’m convinced that your 20s are a revolving door of losing yourself and finding yourself over and over again. The trick is to hold on.
Not holding on as in gripping or clinging. But as in having faith. To keep going. Knowing that the back and forth, the whiplash, the periods of calm clarity, and chaotic confusion are all part of figuring it out.
When there’s a big problem top of mind, something to address head-on, something that’s consuming a large amount of disk space, we may feel miserable but also purposeful. We have a clear sense of what to attribute our emotions to. Eventually, though, that problem subsides. But the chemical craving for sadness, anxiety or any other feeling tone of said problem is still there. So our bodies cue the track but our minds forget the lyrics. You’re left with this all-too-familiar feeling without the catharsis of getting to sing along. That’s the funniest part of being in your twenties (and I imagine beyond).
It’s not always having the big problem that’s the most internally challenging. It’s the interim period after in which the disk space has been cleared, you have your mental and emotional bandwidth again, you feel alright or even good again, and so when a less-than-pretty feeling arises, you have but a clue what to do with it.
This is the middle ground, the in-between, the liminal space. When nothing is really wrong but something just feels off. And I think a lot of us spend a lot of time here.
You are sitting in a coffee shop on a mildly warm winter day and coffee sits anxiously in your stomach. You’re not quite hungry but you feel like maybe you should eat a pastry to sop up the extra caffeine that you had an internal debate about ordering but you decided to go ahead and do it because screw it. And now it’s stirring nauseously within you. You look around, switching back and forth between a bunch of different tasks and you just feel kind of… spun out?
Everything is good. You have the job, the friends, the family, the apartment, the travel plans, the creative projects, the therapist. But something just feels a little off and you can’t quite pinpoint it.
Some of your friends are finding fulfillment by living quiet, creative lives in remote places and others are bubbling over with a full social calendar, career aspirations, promotions, and are on the trajectory toward that version of success. You admire both. You are caught between the two. To be the Buddha? To be the badass bitch? To be both?
To go to business school, to look for new jobs, to find greater satisfaction in the one that you’re in, to count your blessings, to keep striving, to make new friends, to invest more in the ones that you have, to save money, to live for experiences, I could go on and I’m sure you could too.
This washing machine feeling is a) normal, b) everywhere, and c) a sign that your head is not far enough up your ass to forget that there are other ways of existing than the ones that you are living out now. All good things. Part of getting older and knowing yourself better is that there tend to be larger gaps between being in the washing machine, which is great. But when you are back in it again, it can be even more jarring. And then even better to get through to the other side where there’s a clearer sense of tranquility to be found, as well as a strengthening of your values.
To get out of the washing machine, we look to both our relationships with ourselves and our relationships with time.
A healthy relationship with time is an exact template of a heathy relationship between two human beings. When we make a good marriage with time, we instantly apprentice ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marrying another person. Not because the other person is more virtuous than we, or because we have a target personality we are trying to hit, but because whatever sanity, patience, generosity and creative genius we are able to achieve in life is not solely within our own remit. It comes from a real conversation with something other than ourselves.
David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 180
It comes from a real conversation with something other than ourselves.
I called a friend and he didn’t answer. I’m in a bad mood, he quickly replied over text. Perfect. Me too, I said. Wanna chat? He called a few minutes later and we couldn’t stop laughing. We ragged on and on about our woes, some very real in nature and others totally superfluous. But we laughed. Hard. The type of laughter that gets you kicked out of math class for not being able to stomach.
It was lighthearted. It was fun. It took the piss out of our problems. We felt better. We felt humbled. We felt less alone, less insane, more human, more connected, back in step with our values, our priorities. Suddenly, our problems were rightsized. We could see the forest. We reminded each other before we hung up that we feel so much better when we just pick up the damn phone. We don’t have to wait to be shitting rainbows to call. Actually, the opposite is true. Sometimes the end result of a phone call is feeling like you’re floating two inches above the ground, not the prerequisite for it.
It happened again with another friend. Unsexy as it sounds, I started scheduling phone calls with friends who live far because our method of when the right moment serendipitously strikes for us both was resulting in months between catch-ups. Once again, going into our call I felt wanky. 8 flat seconds in and I felt the warmest sensation of homecoming. Decades of friendship rush back in an instant. The type of phone call where I can hear my truth through the reflection held on the other line. And in hanging up, I was teeming with energy and optimism, in possession of a new lease on life, and yet grounded in having been reminded of my truest values and priorities.
My relationship with time (aka with myself) was getting in the way of my relationships with others. Not making time to call my friends and the people that I love was a symptom of that. Racing through tasks, jumping back and forth between things, spending more time sorting to-do lists than actually doing things… all symptoms of a disturbed relationship with time. Which really is a stand-in for a disturbed relationship with myself. Because what I give my energy and attention to in each moment of time is a demonstration of my commitment to my values.
I value love, authenticity, freedom, adventure, and growth.
When I am allocating my time like a chaotic game of hopscotch, I forget about my values. They go by the wayside. And I become fixated on the wrong things or sometimes nothing at all.
“Time” represents what we value and who we are becoming. Hence Whyte’s point: When we make a good marriage with time, we instantly apprentice ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marrying another person.
A marriage is little more than a long conversation between two people. And a marriage with time is an ever-evolving conversation with what matters to you, what you give your attention to, and how you prioritize your time-chip resources based on your values.
What does it mean to have a healthy relationship with time?
To have a healthy relationship with time is to recognize that it’s not just a resource to be managed but a teacher to be embraced. It invites us to be patient. To trust the unfolding of our lives. To find peace of mind in the in-between moments. To seek simplicity. To continuously return back to your core values, priorities, and perspective.
When my marriage with time is rock-solid, I feel the most alive. And as a result of being in a good spot with time, my relationships with others improve. I am more present in conversation. I have more to give. I’m a better listener. I am where my two feet are.
Re-prioritizing conversations with long-distance friends over the phone and remembering how good I feel after slowed me down and put my relationship time under a microscope. All of a sudden it became clear to me that the wobbles I’d been feeling were not actually about the 1,000 stories I’d made up in my head on the pathway to understanding; it was as simple as sitting down with Time and putting it first again.
After I hung up the phone with these friends, I was reacquainted with what really matters. I felt like myself again.
These phone calls were an invitation. To sit quietly. To come back to the traditions and routines that me and Time do to help me remember. To wake up slowly. To do one thing. To subtract instead of add. To simplify. To focus.
You tell the world what matters to you by how you spend your time. Be careful with the messages that you are sending. It’s less of what you are doing, too, and more of the how.
When we feel off, we tend to think we need to add things in to feel better. To start working out more, to add in a challenge, to start doing more of this or more of that when the reality is… we usually need to do less. Less of the superfluous. Freeing up time and headspace to spread our time-chips more intentionally.
I heard a story recently about an engineer who was playing Legos with his daughter. She built a structure tall and high and was so proud. But it started to topple. And so he stepped in to help her bolster. His knee-jerk reaction was to add. She stopped him. Daddy, what if we take some of these blocks away instead? It worked. He was struck by the fact that his four-year-old daughter had the wherewithal to remove instead of add, which went against all of his engineering training. Curious about these instincts, he replicated this study in a lab with many other highly trained engineers and found that when told they could remove blocks (or even encouraged to do so), their tendency was always to add.
That’s how we’re raised. We look for solutions and tend to think that they require more. They rarely do.
To heal your relationship with time and with yourself, do less. Do less. Take blocks away. Give yourself the bandwidth to be here. Reading these words without speeding through to the next thing. Slow down. The world moves fast and we do too. But this is an invitation to pay more attention. To be a better steward of your own time.
To take care of the relationship that you have with yourself. And to remember that “When we make a good marriage with time, we instantly apprentice ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marrying another person.” — David Whyte
It’s very easy to forget that we have a relationship with ourselves. But when we remember and shift from being lost in thought to treating ourselves like we would another person, we actually start to feel like ourselves again. It becomes easy and enjoyable to spend time alone. A lot of the time-chip misallocation just fixes itself.
A friend and I were talking recently about spending a weekend night in and he said something he’d been doing lately (and by that, he meant he’d done this once), was filming a nighttime routine to help him romanticize his solitude. Funny, perhaps obnoxious, and silly as it sounds, it is a perfect example of what I am talking about. In the filming of this video, he was externalizing his relationship with himself. He was constructing a night home alone as he would a night with a friend in tow. Taking care. Paying attention to detail. Slowing down. Appreciating the little things. Going to the gym. Pouring an Olipop into a wine glass. Making a nice dinner. Lighting a candle. Getting in bed with a book. We are so much better at doing this for other people than we are for ourselves. But the reality is that we only ever really have ourselves.
The longest relationship I’ve ever had is with myself. Yours too. Yes, we have family, partners, and lifelong friends. But no matter how lucky you are to love others, the person you spend the most time with is you. That’s really all you have. You + time.
What you are paying attention to right now is it. It’s all you have. This moment, right now, right before you. And we forget that. We allocate our time chips in such bizarre ways. We waste and scroll and distract and numb and spread ourselves thin.
To come back is to remember. To remember that your relationship with time is a marriage. One that will ebb and flow, change and evolve, but if we “apprentice ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marrying another person,” then we get to settle back into a relationship with Time that feels tranquil, grounded, and peacefully exciting. Like waking up on the first morning of a three-day weekend with little planned, a cup of coffee in hand, candles lit, music playing, and not a worry in the world.
My main intention for this year is to focus on what matters. The projects, the relationships, the moments that matter most. I have to define what that means for me. A process of honing in.
If you love your relationship with time, or in other words, the relationship that you have with yourself, you are more likely to spend your time chips wisely and to feel really good in so doing. So I ask you…
What matters to you today?
How are you spreading out your time chips?
What is in front of you?
If you were to treat your relationship with yourself (and your relationship with time) like someone you love, what would you do differently?
What would you do right now?
To close, I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:
If you apply yourself to the task before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you might be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold on to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activities according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which you utter, you will live happily. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 17
That’s all for today!
Thank you for getting
this week. I am so grateful for each of you. I hope you are spending time today in a way that honors who you are and what you value.With so much love,
Charlotte
Char’s Web Song of the Week
Xandra’s Curation Corner
**An always thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of Christian Marclay and Felix Gonzales-Torres this week!
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
#43: the slobs I peeled off the street
#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
#50: the soundtrack of “Up”
Once again Char, your words resonate deeply ...turning 60 this year I'm finally using my "time chips" more wisely, yes, its taken me this long :) so bravo to you for seeing this so clearly in your 20's!! You truly are wise beyond your years and each newsletter you share enriches my life so!! thank you beauty!! also I love the addition of the beautiful music and listening to your voice as well xx
"Spun out"! Thanks for giving words to that coffee shop moment when you've had too much caffeine and are questioning everything. I save your newsletters for when I can read slowly and enjoy them fully.