Time and Timing

     Our lives are made up of the time we have and how we use it. There are countless ways we can spend the time we have each day, each week, each month, and each year. Everyone seems to spend it differently and we all seem to have separate paths and separate goals that guide how we use our time. Time is something we try to manage and control, all while attempting to get the most out of each day in whatever way we see fit. The funny thing about that is, we don't know exactly how much time we even have to spend in our lives. As much as we may try to control how and where we spend our time, it never ceases to amaze me how ineffective this can seem to be. I think a big part of it is that we each are trying to control our own schedules and plan our own days, but then we go out into reality and realize we aren't in a vacuum. As soon as we interact with someone else, things change and our carefully planned schedules can go wildly out of control. The problem is that we can't fully control all of the variables and when our time hits someone else's, things change. And yet, often times we still seem to act as those we can plan out our days exactly as we want them to be.

     But, life is made up of moments where things don't go as planned and we have something happen that we never could have expected. Along those same lines lies the notion of timing. It's been said that timing is everything and that things happen because someone was in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. Most of the time, we can't make good timing happen. Being in that place at that time often relies on things beyond our control. This is something that has become more apparent in my life recently and I'm constantly reflecting on it. I agonizingly analyze events, trying to think of ways I could have spent time differently or how I could have tried to create better timing. The thing is, I don't know how things might have turned out had I spent my time differently. We can all speculate, but we can never know for sure.

     A recent example of this in my life would be just recently when I was at work speaking with my supervisor about the task I was being assigned. A young lady walked up and started talking with my supervisor about how she was getting used to campus and her roommates since she's a transfer student so everything was new to her at UMD. She talked about how she was trying to find a good group or club to get involved with and that she didn't really like her roommates because they were "normal" college kids, meaning they like to go to wild parties and get drunk on the weekends. The whole time I'm listening to her talk, I can't help but feeling a sense of excitement building because I've heard that story and sense of searching for something different before. My supervisor turns to me and asks if I know of any good groups here on campus and I smiled and told her that I knew of just the community she should get involved with, namely The Navigators. I explained to the young lady that this group was pretty special, one that can give you an amazing community of friends, carry you through any situation, and change your life if you let it. She seemed pretty excited herself by the idea so I invited her to our weekly family dinner event happening that evening so that she could get plugged in. After we exchanged contact information and she headed on her way, I sat there for several minutes stunned by what had just occurred. I remembered so clearly how I felt that same way when I was coming in to college here at UMD as many have and I realized how big of an impact this one group has had on me over the years. In terms of timing, how could I have ever known that this meeting would have happened? If she had arrived half an hour before, I would have still been in class and she wouldn't have had the chance to have me tell her about this amazing group and the life changing experience that it offers. If I hadn't been in contact with my supervisor over the winter break regarding a different matter, would she have ever offered me the part time job that I now have that led to this encounter? If I hadn't been in the right place to be invited by a professor to be a part of the program that I am now in that led to the need to contact my now supervisor regarding that other matter, would any of this have happened? Since that first meeting, the young lady has joined The Navs, attended our major Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Conference, and made several new friends that I believe will give her an amazing college experience, as they have for me. But again, would any of this have happened if the original timing wasn't right and I wasn't in the right place at the right time to tip over the first domino? We may never know and I don't think we can. The important thing is that it did happen and a whole new unforeseen path can be made because of it.

     Something else that has come up recently along the same lines is the concept of things taking a long time versus a short time to accomplish or change. When I started my senior year this past fall, I had no idea of what I wanted to be doing after graduation in terms of starting my career. I could understand that concept that I will need a job and that the ideal is to find something that I will enjoy doing, but I didn't know what that meant for me in terms of what I should be going after. It felt like it should be something that I could "get done", meaning that I should be able to spend an afternoon exploring career paths that come out of the two majors that I have, and that by the end of the day I should know what I want to do. It turned out though that this wasn't the case and it took a mix of going through interviews, taking more classes, and really exploring the possibilities to get a good notion of what I may enjoy doing, at least as a starter point. I had to be told over and over by people such as my father that these thing don't happen overnight and that they take time. The time that I took to go through all that I did has given me a much clearer focus as to what I'm aiming for. Could or should it have taken a longer or shorter time to reach the point where I'm now at? I could see the result that I wanted and felt like it shouldn't take any time at all, but it has taken time and that's what has caused me to grow. Again though, I may have never discovered my current interests had the timing not been right for me to have spoken with a recent graduate from my same major, who recommended I take a class in the area that I'm now interested in. If the timing hadn't been right for me to have had the internship experience that I had this past summer, I may never have found out more about what I do and don't enjoy doing. Heck, if the timing hadn't been right for me to have the opportunity to run my produce business as I did, I may have never selected the majors that I'm about to graduate with a degree in. The possibilities and paths to follow all of the timing chain backwards through my life are limitless.

     Time is such a strange concept, one we can't fully understand and wrap our minds around. No matter what, there are so many ways to spend your time that you can never do everything, so choices must be made. It's funny how time seems to fly by when we're having fun and yet it drags on when we can't wait for something to be over or for something to happen. Think about the way you're spending your time today. Are you spending it in the most productive way? Who is to say what the most productive way is? Does it even matter? If you are spending your time unwisely according to someone else's standards or ideas, does that affect you? Why or why not? If you "waste" your time doing something seemingly trivial and meaningless, is that really a bad thing? What if it turns into something that somehow allows you to follow your dreams and feel fulfilled in life? If you had spent more time focusing on something or trying to be better at some task or had spent more time with that one person, would the outcome have been different? .

     But timing is everything, right? I believe that's a really odd and difficult concept because if it were really everything then why aren't we spending all of our time focusing on how to make our timing perfect? Or who knows, maybe we are and we just don't realize it. Is it even possible to make our timing perfect? Sure, we can try to put the odds in our favor by being in certain places at certain times, but do we actually think that that's what makes good timing happen? Timing is the "everything" that we can't control or predict. We make plans and schedule how we're going to spend our time, and then God laughs and throws us way off course. But who knows, maybe it's all for the better that timing in this regard is a great unknown. It's what's led to the lives that we now lead and has even lead to you reading this blog post because your timing was right to see it go by in your online ventures. I guess overall I would say that time really isn't a finite resource and it can lead to changes we never could have imagined, whether that be over the course of an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Time is a valuable resource though, one that you should spend wisely, in whatever way that may look like for you. But even if you don't, don't worry because you can never know what will come next as a result of how you spent your time. For now, I leave you with the thanks for taking the time to read this post and consider how you may relate. Remember, this is all just a thought.