Time – I. Time, Personality, and Circumstances
Date Posted: March 1st, 2007
No two people experience the passage of time in exactly the same way. The busy executive, and the harried woman who holds a full-time job and runs a household will experience time very differently from a retired person. On the other hand, the image of the retired person sitting on a rocking chair and knitting for her grandchildren exists mainly in pictures kept in dusty albums. Many retired people today keep busy. Unfortunately, for some, the minutes and the hours crawl. They are lonely (even if they do not live alone) and miserable. They have nothing to live for. Time can be an asset or a liability. We make the choice and live with it.
How we perceive and handle time will be influenced by our personality. Some people are great managers of their time, others run in hot pursuit after the hours of the day, and never quite accomplish what they set out to do.
We have all met, worked, or perchance lived with a person who always seems to be sitting on hot coals. Everything and everybody moves in slow motion in his world. We refer to such a person as the type A personality. At the opposite end is the person who walks through life in measured steps. Hers is not a relaxed life; she experiences endless frustrations since she is always behind in her work. Finally, there is an in-between type, the type B personality. She appreciates the limitations time imposes upon all of us. More gets accomplished in her kingdom because calm reigns.
Circumstances, especially culture, will determine how we view time. When I lived in Egypt the pace of life was slow. When I came to Canada 42 years ago, I did find that life was too hurried for my taste. It’s much worse today. Israel, where I lived for 7 years, falls in between. People work hard, have a reasonable standard of living, but haven’t lost the pure unadulterated joy one should derive from everyday life.
