Time Garden

Reimagining how we cultivate our days and years

Hi Friends,

Just two weeks ago or so, I was thinking about the common metaphor “time is money” again. This is something that comes up regularly for me—too often, actually.

I think about money much more than I want to. I wasn’t always this way, and I hope I won’t always be this way, but I’ve been wrestling through something for the last few years that is probably a piece of a more fundamental transformation I have been experiencing. So, I choose to wrestle through it rather than disengage. Which is why I bring up money in these posts a lot. I got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. Writing is one way I wrestle with my thoughts, so you get to hear about my money musings sometimes, lovely reader.

Today’s letter is not about money, actually, but to get to where I’m going, first I need to talk about money.

Going through a divorce and then becoming self-employed soon after really made me face my money beliefs. And I’m not just talking about surface money-management skills when it comes to financial planning, or managing a budget and so on, and I’m not even talking about things like attitudes, values, or goals. I’m talking about an even deeper reality - the fabric of understanding and meaning-making that underlies human financial systems, both personal and collective.

The language we use for things is deeply connected to the way we think. Language is thinking. Notions like “time is money” are deeply ingrained in our collective thinking as a capitalistic society. We know now—we know more and more all the time—that capitalism is deeply damaging. Damaging to the planet, to other species, to our society, even to our individual psyches. A lot of us want to do something about this, and so we make these little changes, anything we can think of, to try and combat it. But it is always there. We’re quite stuck. It kinda sucks. We all know this, even as we try to fix it.

Years ago I rejected the notion that time is money, and yet, I find myself really struggling to escape it. It constantly comes back to me. As a freelancer one of my learning curves has been figuring out the worth of my work in the marketplace (gag!) (but necessary!) and how to properly charge for my services. (So far, I’ve mostly made mistakes and have been trying to learn from them.) All of this is complicated by having less wiggle room in my financial life after having “spent all my money on a bookstore” 🤪, plus the work I do is a mixture of things that earn dollars, things that don’t, things that might, and things that never will but are important anyway.

I used to collect a salary (with benefits, good Lord), which came with the additional mental benefit of being able to show up my job and do whatever work needed to be done that day, or, if there was extra time, to start new projects. I tried to a good job… but I didn’t have to think about my earnings day to day because the salary just rolled in. If the fire alarm went off and we all had to go outside, or if the loud-mouthed sales guy from down the hall stopped by my desk to shoot the shit for an hour, sure I might lose a little productivity for the afternoon, but I didn’t have to stop the clock on client hours (those are the paid ones.)

Now, being self-employed, I have to think about what I earned today… every single day. I can work all day… I can be productive and focused on my highest work-priorities—I can be killing it….and make nothing. Some days are just like that. And then some days you plan to do a lot of client hours and then the landscaping guys show up to powerwash and leaf blow everything all day and the loud sounds are distracting but also send your dog into an anxiety loop so she’s sitting at your feet panting and shaking in terror and you can’t just ignore her and at the end of the day you only got half the billable hours done that you planned. Learning to roll with it is… well, I’m still learning. Freelancing is a learning curve, like I said. So far, it’s working out. We’ll see how much more learning I can handle before I give it all up and go work like an automaton in an Amazon warehouse.

All of this to say, that life circumstances right now force me to make this mental connection between time and money every day. It’s kind of annoying. But perhaps the benefit of being regularly annoyed by a problem is that it forces you to want to fix the problem.

The problem I’m talking about is not a money problem... It’s the problem of reshaping how I think about time.

This letter is about time. Time. Time. Time.

‘Time is money’ is a bad metaphor because metaphor as a device relies on the similarities between things, and time and money don’t actually have much in common. Money was invented by humans, for example. Humans lived together in societies for ages before inventing money. Money is a tool we invented, but now in capitalism we have all become tools. We keep talking about this fear about AI taking over…. dudes—money already did it.

I digress.

Time, unlike money, is part of the physical reality of the universe. It is inescapable. You sometimes hear things like, ‘money and time are both finite resources’ blah blah blah, which is also false. The worlds smartest humans have not yet figured out whether time is finite or infinite.

We sometimes float ideas of each individual person ‘possessing’ a certain ‘quantity’ of years of life that they need to ‘use wisely’ and ‘not squander’ and so on. Squander, and spend, are both words we use to describe how we can use our money, but we use those same words to describe how we use our time. That extended metaphor shows that we really do have a tendency to think about time and money in the same way. Language is thinking, and language is shared, and language can also be both incorrect and damaging. We know this. So let’s wrestle through our thinking, and change our reality by addressing a language problem.

I could go on and on—I kind of already have been, so thanks for bearing with me. Today’s letter is about trying to get unstuck in this way thinking. I want to rescue and recover and reimagine the way I think about time.

Reminder: This post isn’t about money. It’s about time.

I want to transform the way I think about time. But I am confronted daily with the extent to which capitalism has co-opted my understanding of time… of our understanding of time. If we want, as individuals and as a society, to halt, and then begin repairing the damage caused by capitalism, we’re not going to get too far until we transform and heal our underlying understanding, and therefore our language about time.

Time is not a resource that you can possess, count, earn, spend, waste, lose, squander, invest, multiply, gamble, or anything like that.

I sat on my living room couch two weeks ago, going through my daily time-money calculation again and feeling kind of annoyed about it. Frankly it was ruining the day before the day even started—a day that otherwise looked like a splendid sunny day full of writing, editing, yoga, walks in the park with my dog and a delicious dinner with my love—when I suddenly became aware again of the broken metaphor… and decided… I need a new metaphor for how I think about my days.

We need a new metaphor for time.

Then I thought…. well, what is a better metaphor?

I blanked.

Then I thought…. well, I guess I’ve got to make one!

Good thing I’m writer. It only took me about 30 seconds to make a new metaphor, and one that I believe is much more accurate and in line with reality.

I have decided to start shifting my thinking about time by imagining it as a garden.

Let me walk you through it.

Time, the 4th dimension of physical reality, is closely connected to space. (Soooooo fascinating, OMG. I would love to be a physicist but I cannot do math to save my life.)

Time and space are like🤞this. Like this space—this room I sit in right now, typing these words. This room existed for a decade before I moved in. Long before this room took up this space, it was part of rainforest. Eventually, I will leave and go occupy another space, and someone else will hang out here. Maybe, one day, this whole building will get torn down and another one will be built in its place. Maybe one day the rainforest will take over this space again.

Time is like that. It is not some count-able thing that we are given a certain number of. (Clocks and calendars are also human inventions, by the way.) Time pre-exists us. We pop into time for a while, and then we pop out. Time is still there, flowing like a river that we are able to swim around in for a little while.

I popped into time in 1980 and I’m not sure when I will pop out. Just like I get to temporarily inhabit this office, I also get to temporarily inhabit a certain stretch of time.

You might enjoy a different metaphor for time than a garden, but I think if you can choose something that is some kind of physical space, that might help you. My mind automatically went to the garden metaphor because I personally have adopted a lot of plant metaphors into my thinking. (I recently shared that I learned self-care by imagining myself as a houseplant, and how to give the plant what it needs to be healthy and grow, as one example.)

I grew up in small towns and spent a lot of my young years walking around in nature. Even though I’m a city girl now who doesn’t garden much and who didn’t take any of the nature-sciences in school, I love thinking about nature… thinking about creatures, and trees and roots and fungi and microorganisms that live in soil… and I like thinking about the garden in the creation myth and how human beings are a part of nature—an animal that is dependant on, and intertwined with every other living being on the planet. Yet we have this other relationship with nature where we can rearrange it and reorganize it and cultivate it. We can, if we want to, care for the entire earth like a garden. We can, if we choose to, make it beautiful and healthy and thriving. I think humans have forgotten that this is possible.

But, I’m getting off track.

I just mean that I like the idea of a garden. You can choose a space that’s meaningful for you, as long as you realize how much you have control when it comes to what’s in the space, how the space looks and feels, who comes into the space and when. Your time is not something you have and spend. Your time is the space you get occupy with your life.

I’m talking about time, and the way I think about time. The time that I occupy, like this office room I sit in now. I think about my time garden. What would it look like?

If I can manage the feat of transforming my conception of time as simply being the occupant of a beautiful garden that I can cultivate any way I like, what would that look like in terms of daily living?

What does my time garden look like now? What naturally grows here and what kinds of plants have I been cultivating inside of it already? What plants are missing from my garden that I would like to make space for, and where is the best location for them to go? Can I tuck them in gently somewhere or will I need to overhaul and old flower bed? What work needs to be done to prepare the soil?

How can I play with the extended metaphor of seasonal planting? How about the metaphor of companion planting?

What kind of vegetables do I like, and what kind of flowers? How much space would I like to dedicate for growing food and how much for sheer beauty? Would I like a butterfly garden? Bird feeders? A garden cat? If I grow excess food, who will I share it with and how? Would I set out a bin for passers-by, or install a huge patio table for hosting friends? Will I include a a lounge chair for reading? In the sun or in the shade?

So anyways… I’ve been playing with these thoughts for 2 weeks. Earlier this week the work-money balance was thrown off by a series of random circumstances so the time-is-money situation intruded upon my imaginings. Yesterday I tried to think about my time garden some more… how to translate these beginning inklings, these seeds of new life, if you will, into my actual daily approach to my life and my work.

Which reminds me of one of my all time favourite quotes…

“You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”
Henri JM Nouwen

For now, this is a fun thought experiment but I need to start figuring out how to live it. You know?

This is new, and a little wack-a-doodle, but I wanted to tell you about it because I think it could be helpful. But transforming one’s thoughts, like any habit, takes focused effort over time. We’ll see if I can figure this out. If you’ve already figured it out, please let me know, haha!

Anyways… I’ll probably write about this more about this concept in the future. I hope you enjoyed this week’s letter. It was a fun one to write. If you know someone who would enjoy the concept of a time garden, please pass this letter along. Sharing is caring.

Have a great Friday and a fun weekend!