Do You Have the Time?

A dear friend of mine who is going through a bit of a transitional period made the comment awhile back that she was going to give herself time.

I love that idea: Give Yourself Time.

So often we are filling our days with crap to do that we forget the most basic and luxurious gift we can give ourselves. Time. We can do whatever we want with it. We can push through days nearly out of breath and wishing we had two more hours when 10:00 p.m. rolls around.

Or we can just sit, for just one moment and not do one thing. We can busy ourselves with doing nothing.

This morning I lost my patience with my daughter. It started with toothpaste. She went from, “I can brush my teeth MYSELF,” to “I can put the toothpaste on my toothbrush MYSELF, MOM!” (The mom part was said with that annoyed teenager voice that my daughter has already perfected at age four.) It escalated from there and ended with her crying and me getting more mascara on my eyelids than my lashes.

After rinsing her toothbrush off and sending her to the timeout chair, I took a moment and a few breaths. By now, there was no way we were going to make her 9:00 a.m. preschool start time. So I stopped. I went in and shared the timeout chair with her as I belonged in it as much as she did. I held her, told her how sorry I was and we started the morning over.

I gave myself a small sliver of time to start over this morning.

In the larger scope of life, I think it’s just as important to give myself bigger gaps of time–a week, a month, a year. Whatever it is I want to do, change, or improve, the best thing I can give myself is the time to do it.