It’s easy to feel like a captive of time when you live with a disability. Time is the sixth sense that controls our lives. Appointments, caregiver schedules, sitting time, weight shifts, peeing or pooping, switching tires, getting a new chair, medical tests and exams and more — all subject to minutes, hours, days, years. Our constant internal clock ticks away as we plan each moment for the short and long game of life with disability.

Disabled or not, we are constantly bombarded with reminders about time: how our lives are beholden to it; how technology can provide us with more of it; how we should be investing in products to erase it from our bodies and faces; how little of it our species has remaining on this planet if we don’t change our ways.
Yet the main thing I absorb from the constant time-consciousness and supposed advancements is more pressure — to be, do, work and live faster. And with this pressure, I feel like the quality of everything is diminished.

Even the act of trying to decide your overall life philosophy about time usage is stressful. Do I go with “Good things take time” or “Carpe diem”? “Rome wasn’t built in a day” or “Just do it”? “Make a five-year plan” or “Live in the now”? Ugh.

When we think on it too much, time shrinks our lives.

With this in mind, I now think positively on the period I spent in rehab after my spinal cord injury. For three months my entire world came to a halt. My crammed college schedule was suddenly moot. And time expanded.

Lying awake in my rehab room, it felt like night would never come to an end. Every minute spent in pain or discomfort felt like an eternity. Each tiny recovery gain — turning over in bed, pushing up a 10-foot slope, completing a transfer — seemed to take FOREVER. Then, suddenly, it was over. I was headed home. Three months of my life had whizzed by like I was a tourist on an out-of-control scooter. Weird.

The absurdity of time can feel so confusing, conflicting and incongruous that we can be driven mad by it, like the Hatter of Alice in Wonderland.

Or…

We can free ourselves by remembering time is a construct — not a fundamental truth. We humans have manufactured it to help us make sense of our life events, memories and change. Time is a way to check in and situate ourselves, so we can derive some small measure of comfort amidst the vastness of existence; there’s solace in knowing that we have a mechanism for showing up together at a happy hour or for the start of a baseball game. Time gives us regularity, reliability.

Physicists and philosophers have long interrogated the concept of time. Some quantum physicists theorize that we aren’t progressing through anything, that it’s all happening right now — past, present, and future. All at once.

For those of us who feel the pressure to move faster but often need — or want — to slow down, the physicists may provide some measure of relief.

Thinking this way reminds us that obsessing about saving and wasting time isn’t achieving anything other than added stress. If we really did create time, we can manipulate it, stop it, even remake it. We have the freedom to essentially TURN IT OFF. Or change the way we heed it.

Now, this isn’t necessarily easy when some of our vital elements — like caregivers, vents or skin checks — operate according to the time construct. We have to adhere to it, somewhat. But challenging the construct in little ways can help us own it.

Instead of feeling frustrated or guilty about how much longer certain tasks take because of your disability, lean into them. Get rid of unneeded deadlines for, say, developing a relationship with a new person, or creating an artistic piece. Don’t beat yourself up when you set a goal to wake up at 6 a.m. and you can’t pull yourself out of bed until 8:30. Don’t set timetables for things that are stifled by them. Instead, choose to explore them, like, for instance, the many possibilities for sensual pleasure, which take more investment to discover. Luxuriate in the investment.

I urge us all to take a cue from two populations who seem to have a more reasonable approach to the abstractness of time: kids and centenarians. Kids couldn’t care less about time. I remember vacationing on the Michigan beaches as a kid. I must have spent hours upon hours sifting through the sand with my fingers, floating in the water, looking at the sky and feeling the sun, scanning every grain for burrowing ant lions. Time was irrelevant.

And while I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be 100, I recently read a book about Japanese centenarians on the island of Okinawa. Their days are filled with all sorts of life events, but they aren’t stressed about temporal concerns. They take time to master activities like gardening and craftsmanship. Not much changes on a regular basis, so they find joy in every moment because there is no compulsion to rush. They enjoy the process, and over much time they have become masters of life.

I remember these two groups when I have to do things like make my bed by myself, which on the hands of the clock takes at least three times as long as it would if I could stand, lean and reach. I think of a child making it into a fun game, or a centenarian enjoying some silence or music time while engaging with the task. Here those of us with disabilities have an advantage, if we choose to embrace it. We often have no choice but to operate at a slower pace and to focus on what’s immediately facing us, rather than jump three steps ahead.

If we don’t fight this adjusted pace, we can be the masters of stretching time, making temporal space for simple, intentional things. We can allow the slower details of our lives to expand our experience. We can resist the pressure to hurry. We can maintain the integrity of doing things long-form — with focus, breath and intentionality — realizing there is time for everything if we allow it. Perhaps, ultimately, we can resist allowing the construct of time to rob us of fully appreciating all the intricate joys of our ephemeral existence.

So, TAKE YOUR TIME. Own your velocity, own your rate of perceived change. Resist setting the end-point and luxuriate instead in the process. Turn off your phone, take down your clock (at least for a bit). Trade instant gratification for long-term gratification. I have a hunch that in doing so, we will actually be more productive and fulfilled.

Slow and steady wins the race.