The Mind-Blowing Power of Einstein Time

Time... sigh.... there's either too much of it or never enough of it. Kind of like Goldlilocks and the Three Bears - bed was too hard, too soft and... but wait, she found a "just right" bed. Why can't we find a "just right" relationship with time?

I did a blog post about this a few months ago... errr... well, almost a year ago... I shared my relationship with time (there's never enough of it), my friend Violet's relationship (la-dee-dah, I have all the time in the world) and my other friend Leo (just the right amount of time).

I admitted to being perplexed by our different relationships to time and really wanted to know how I could shift more to the middle (Leo's zone). I came across a quote from a guy named Gay Hendricks, who wrote a book called The Big Leap. In the book, he talked about Einstein Time...

“You are time, you are where time comes from... and... since you are the producer of time, you can make as much of it as you need.” (from The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks)

I promptly put the book on my to-read list (via the library) and had to wait several months (eight of them) to get my hands on a copy of the book. By the time it came, I'd forgotten why I wanted to read it but... when I got to the Einstein Time chapter, it all clicked into place.

So, here's the gist of it... in a Newtonian world, there are two ends of the time spectrum... Time Cops (always making sure everyone is on time... ahem... this would be me) and Time Slackers (never on time... that would be my friend Violet). But... relating to time from the Newtonian view - that it's in limited supply and we are at the mercy of it - is not the only way to relate to time.

Einstein gave an example about how sitting on a hot stove for an hour can seem like an eternity. While spending an hour with your beloved can go  by in a flash. Ergo... time is relative. Hendricks takes it a step further and say it's not just time, but also space. Sitting on the stove, we aren't present to the space we are in, we are trying to escape that space and therefore time will slow down. But, when we fully inhabit the space we are in and accept it for what it is, time speeds up.

If we always walk around saying things like: I don't have enough time. I don't have time for this. There isn't enough time. Where does the time go? etc etc... we are creating our own perception of time... that there is a lack of it.

Soooo... the idea is to shift from Newtonian Time to Einstein Time... first step is to stop complaining about time and the lack thereof.

Let's say I have 30 minutes before I have to leave for an appointment. My old conversation would have been, "That's not enough time to start anything" and I'd fritter away the time. My new conversation is, "That's plenty of time to start something" and I just get started. I try to occupy that space completely, not worry that I am going to be late (setting an alarm helps with that), and just work on whatever it is that I want to work on.

And... believe it or not... it actually works. The hands on the clock (or the numbers on the digital clock) don't seem to move as fast and I'm shocked at how much I can get done in 30 minutes... or 10 minutes. Just because I allow myself to be in the moment and not worry about the time.

I had sort of thought before that I was at one end of Relationship with Time spectrum (Time Cop) and my friend Violet was at the other (Time Slacker) with my buddy Leo in the middle but... turns out Leo is not even playing in the same Newtonian time spectrum at all... he just works in Einstein Time. Mind blowing.... And I'm finding that that as I release my death-hold grip on time... it flows better and I'm in a better flow with it.

If anyone wants to read Hendricks' chapter on Einstein Time, I've posted it here, as a public link in Dropbox - it will open as a pdf. For those who are more visual or auditory, here's a five minute video by a guy named Tom Adams who gives a brief synopsis of Einstein Time...