How to Kill Time

Are you interested in being an owner of your life? By "owner," I mean owning moments as they unfold versus getting trapped in suffering-laden mental habits of past losses, failures or traumas, or future-bound anxieties and doubt. If you want to own life versus be possessed by thoughts like these, then you’ll want to learn to kill time.

No, I’m not talking about passively vegging out in from of the TV, playing video games, or gossiping about family or friends (certainly not the last one as we’ll later discuss). This is not about how to “spend” your time across your life more “productively.” You will find no time management or organizational hacks here (as cool as those might be). No, I mean you’ll need to kill your rigid belief and habitual fixations on thoughts of "conceptual" time.

"I'm always ending up with the wrong person" or "People never give my ideas a chance" or the "what ifs" of time-laced thoughts that tie our well-being up in knots.

I'm a psychologist, not a theoretical physicist, so I do not claim to be an expert on time as it relates to actual, meta-physical time and its real interaction with matter, energy and gravity. No, I'm talking about the time we interact with on a daily basis in our minds, the conceptual time we do or don't "have," that we feel like we're "losing," or that occupies such much of our mental and emotional real estate.

Owners of their lives don’t spend their time (and therefore their relationships). Owners of daily moments let the concept of time die into the broader connection of present moment awareness of the felt richness, the energetic charge, of the moment. Owners see their thoughts without following them down rabbit holes and missing out on the nooks and nuanced crannies of possibilities for connecting, healing, and creating.

As perhaps you’ve learned at some point, “past” and “future” are stories. They are thoughts as memories or anticipated unfoldings. There's nothing wrong, or broken about you thinking about the past or future. The problem, the suffering (of anxiety, overwhelm, self-doubt, depression, anger) happens when you fixate on thoughts of past and future to the exclusion of other things happening in your experience, things that might bring healing, connection, creative output or alivesness.

Here’s my question for you … when are they (thoughts of past and future) happening? You guessed it: now.

“Yeah, yeah,” you might be thinking (now, by the way), “I get that and yet it’s important we remember the past, so we learn from mistakes and cherish the good in our lives.”

Here’s me giving you a huge nod of agreement.

“And it’s also crucial,” you continue (again, in the present moment of your mind’s ticker tape parade of thinking), “… to plan for what’s to come and have goals for getting the most out of our relationships, careers, and families — for being as happy as possible.”

Insert another nod from me (and add a smile, perhaps a thumbs up, maybe a fist bump!)

“So, isn’t it sort of silly to try to bring about the demise of time?”

Nope! … Did I hesitate? (You’re not here with me to see me typing this, but no, I did not hesitate over the keys at all — I swear! — and when am I typing by the way? You guessed it.)

Killing time is not doing away with the concept. It's about putting time-thinking into its proper place — as a tool for navigating relationships, resources, and the needs of our body. Like other concepts such as your self-story-identity “thing,” it is a useful tool in the game of living this life.

Ample research has accumulated to make it clear that human beings’ perceptions of time are constructions of the brain. If you’re skeptical, try an experiment referenced by neuroscientist David Eagleman. Look at yourself in the mirror, focus your gaze on your right eye, and then shift your focus to the left. Go back and forth. Do you see your eyes moving? You don’t because your brain fills in the millisecond time gaps when your eyeballs shift. Hey, your brain seems to have its own neurologic daylight savings! Thank your brain for the time “savings”!

Mindfulness Essential Reads

What's the Evidence for Mindfulness for Depression?

Living Slowly

Time not only has biologically-based illusions baked into it, it also comes pre-molded to make our daily doings, relational or otherwise, fit into this construction we call “life.”

Time is very much like the little sand timers that come with board games. You use them to keep track of turn-taking, but do you ever really believe the sand trickling through from one side of the glass (or more typically, plastic) is anything other than a tool for making the game flow along (and cut down on player in-fighting, poor Amazon reviews, and maximize game sales?). I mean, it’s sand and a bit of plastic! Do you carry your precious little sand timer with you and chuck it at people yelling “See! You’re wasting my time!” or clutch it close to your chest whispering to it that you have “all the time in the world — thank you, Time, for coming into my life!”

Of course, you don’t! You know it’s a tool. You use tools, so don’t become so attached to this one that you become a tool!

At some level it may be dawning on you (when?... now) or dawning again for the thousandth time, like the sunrises people have used as a marker of time for thousands of years, that there is nothing actual in time other than its convenient toolishness.

Owning relationships in your life requires using tools and then putting them down again. Use time when you need to show up for a doctor’s appointment or buy your wife a Mother’s Day card (note to Author-Self). Use time and then put down rigid, fixated, dependence on it. Put down — kill — rigid, slavish belief in it. Otherwise, you risk living a life of clutched or projectile sand timers versus having your hands and heart free to own moments as they arise.

I’m at my father’s home visiting at this moment. He’s away now running a clock-based errand and I’m alone in his house. The grandfather clock he carved and constructed years ago is ticking in the background as I write this piece.

Instead of getting stuck in memory or future fixations of time, I can appreciate the moment’s memory of his craftsmanship, and then I can also pause and taste the full-bodied flavor of my espresso, hear the clack of keyboard keys, and savor the timeless machine I’m using to own this moment, just as it is, just when it is. I can be available to the here-ness, the vivid textures of his return for what that moment, timelessly, brings forward to be owned.

OWN IT: “Use Your TimeLESS Machine.”

Practice being a“momentologist.” Momentologists drop out of the trap of time-bound, rigid and fixated thinking about "past" and "future." Instead, momentologists — owners of moments — resonate with the rich, felt change of moments as they happen, letting thoughts of past and future be just what they actually are ... thoughts that come and go.

In your journal or in a moment of quiet contemplation, wonder how your time-bound thinking has perhaps led you to skip the crucial step of ownership, of being a momentologist to what is occurring in moments with whatever is there to be noticed, connected with, created or addressed in the now.

Instead of focusing on what solution is called for, or why something happened, or when bad things will stop or good things will come, are you willing to sit and practice the O.W.N.ing this timeless moment? ONLY this moment of experiencing your body and mind? Without following time-thoughts backward or forward? Noticing the richness of what’s happening?

As an owner of this moment, ask: What else is here and now? What might be missed, passed over, and unowned if it weren’t for this sincere, open asking? Remember, use time as a tool, don’t be a tool!