As my time in undergrad comes to an end, I am compelled to reflect on my lessons and experiences throughout this journey. While the core of them vary from corporate financial theory to the lengthy works of Martin Luther (1483), I find myself dwelling more on the lessons that were learned through experience as opposed to curriculum. The most prevalent and reoccurring of them all would be that almost everyone has a poor perspective of time. While there may be those that can “manage” time or those that may seem as if they have “more” than others, I’ve come to realize that even a privileged or optimistic perspective on such a commodity is still a poor perspective. Not only is our perspective poor, but our obsession with either beating or meeting time is probably one of the poorest habits of a valuable people. This is due to the fact that, we as human beings are conditioned to conquer something continuous as if it is temporary. Few are cognizant of such a flaw as the most prominent concepts that are centered around time are intended to translate minutes into milestones rather than seeing every second in its own significance. By this translation we’re bound to cite rhetoric like “I just need to make it to this next paycheck”...”I just need to make it to the end of the month”...”I just need to make it to graduation”...”I just need to make it to tax season…….and then I’ll be alright.” I’ve found that this mentality is the perfect setup for cyclical warfare. In that, we are more prone to set deadlines indicative of survival rather than success even in moments of success.
Both a privileged and oppressive perspective can be toxic, because you have individuals who assume that they have a ton of time and those that assume they have too little. Although we have an outline of minutes, days, months and years, we often fail to precisely quantify it. Where we may have a goal of finishing a task within a few hours or a few days, we’ll frequently find that we either underestimated the time we need or utilized the time allocated to procrastinate, assuming that we had more than enough. Even more so, one of the poor habits that leads to poor perspective is comparison. And when it comes to time, it seems to fly for everyone else, while it crawls for ourselves. Current culture has further tainted the perspective of time as it has allowed the both significant and insignificant occurrences to share the same platform. In summing both the miniscule and monumental into moments on a “timeline,” the schema of any viewer/consumer becomes susceptible to potential alterations. Through involuntary vulnerability, we begin to subconsciously set timelines based on the actions, accolades and/or account(s) of another. In setting deadlines for a task that were not assigned to us, in order to replicate success, we find our work in squander, as our plagiarized timeline did not account for a source of submission.
With one of the poorest habits of a value people being our misuse of such a valuable source, we find ourselves in an imbalance. As opposed to regarding the infinite as such, we reallocate that regard to things that can be contained. In doing so, we presume that we are assuming control and therefore gaining security and or assurance. In relinquishing control and breaking such a bad habit, we’ll find a freedom that is neither excessive or limited, and subsequently acquire a renewed perspective eliminating finite possibility from infinite opportunity.
Erin Allene Hollman
