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It's Time!

by Cat Charissage

Are you a living example of how you want the world to be?   It’s time!   Are you living your days in alignment with your deepest values and hopes for your children, for the world?   It’s time!   Are you teaching your children, by your example, how to design a deeply joyful life of study, reflection, and activity, a life of stewardship and sustainability?  It’s time!

Time.  It seems so often that time is the problem.  There’s not enough of it.  Time never passes the way we want it to.  It goes too quickly when you’re having fun and too slowly when it’s the third snowed-in day.  It takes time to do things well.  Nursing takes time.  Reading stories takes time.  Listening to stories takes even more time.  But time really is all we have.  Time keeps everything from happening all at once, allowing us to savour, to grow, to change, to love.   It is the one thing that is truly equitable in this life:  we all have the same 24 hours each day.  Time is a limited, valuable entity in which we sculpt the meaning of our days.  Isn’t it about time we quit fighting it?

What is it time for you to do?  Only you can answer that, but remember, there are children watching.

I remember the first time someone asked me “Are you the best example of how you want the world to be?”  It was near the end of my time working at the Sexual Assault Centre in London, Ontario, and I was at a week-long conference on aligning your life with your values.   Pretty stressed out and exhausted, I had been working non-stop with the best intentions that anyone could muster, very much like the good intentions I have now in providing an environment for Leadership Education, very much like the good intentions I witness in so many of you who are now reading this.

When the presenter looked me in the eyes and challenged me like that, all I could do was look back at her in despair.  She continued, “Go ahead, say it out loud:  ‘I am the best example of how I want the world to be.’”  I couldn’t.   All I could think of was that I didn’t have time to be a good example because I was so busy doing so many urgent and important tasks that never stopped coming.   I ran around getting a lot of good things done, but I knew I wasn’t any model of peace, sustainability, or healthful living.  If people lived like me, we’d have a world of exhausted bodies and despairing hearts.  But I also knew it was time --- time to be able to say it with all the integrity in my heart.

So, can YOU say it out loud?  “I am a great example of how I want the world to be!”

It is possible to say this with integrity, it really is, and it’s worth working towards.  It’s the quickest way I know to deep happiness and peace, but it sure doesn’t just happen.    While there are as many ways to design a life aligning our days with our values as there are people,  I have found that some simple tools can help us sculpt that alignment more efficiently and more effectively.  Those of us who have the freedom to choose how and when we will perform our daily activities have a wonderful opportunity to teach our children how to handle freedom.  Let’s use and pass on the best tools we can, tools such as a weekly plan, the development of a few core habits, and a daily rhythm that supports the creation of the world we want to live in.

Do you have a compass for the week?  Of all the interesting and important things that you could do with your family, what will you focus on this week?  Think of all your primary roles or relationships, and pick one or two behaviours or attitudes in each role that if followed, will best encourage the greatness in that relationship or stewardship in your life.  Sometimes  this will be a clear “to do”; sometimes this will be a reminder to yourself to look for a teachable moment, or a reminder to smile and look into your child’s eyes before giving direction.  The best time to write out this compass is before a weekly family meeting to guide some of the discussion, and reviewed after the meeting in light of what life asks of you this week.  If you do this faithfully, week after week, you will come to know what to do, what is most important for you, what you can do.

You could put this compass in the front of your calendar or planner, so as to see it every time that you consult your calendar, guiding your “yes” or “no” to the opportunities of the moment.   For many people carrying around our calendar is not workable, but all of us can carry a piece of paper and a pen in our pockets to capture the impressions and ideas of the moment.  (Weeding out your wardrobe so that every single pair of pants, every skirt, and every dress has pockets is also a good way to make your life more effective.)  This paper can also capture a reminder to teach a child a certain skill, freeing you to not feel that you must always correct, correct, correct.  If every evening you transfer those little notes to your planner and every morning you consult your compass, I assure you that your life will be much more peaceful and meaningful.

Have you created a daily rhythm that incorporates the most important things for you and your family?  Only some of us will need a strict schedule, but a default, predictable rhythm of one activity following another will free us up to accomplish all those things we feel we “should” do --- or at least the most important of them.  Dancing well with our daily rhythms will also allow us to offer great and wonderful service, taking on new and exciting projects we had never thought we would have time for.

There are many other habits and tools to help us create the work of art called our life, and of course almost endless possibilities to increase the skill with which we handle those tools.   What’s the most important thing for you to do now?

Because it’s time.  Our children won’t stop growing and learning from our example until we get our act together.  They will move into the world whether we are an example to them or not.  Let’s live, now, the lives we know we can.  It’s time!

Cat Charissage is living her second adult life homeschooling her Transition to Scholar son, attempting to live gracefully with chronic illness, and helping others to focus their skills and energies into life enhancing missions through mentoring life leadership, time management, and organizational and academic skills.  She spent her first adult life as a public educator in social services, engaged in the graduate study of theology, and completed an M.Ed.