By Renita Kalhorn

Here in New York, holiday decorations had made their appearance before we had even celebrated Thanksgiving. Apparently time is not passing by fast enough for the rabid retailers.

Accordingly, the pace picks up as our days fill with additional seasonal activities – parties, shopping, travel – crowding already jam-packed schedules. But rather than savoring the specialness of the season, we rush along in a frenzy of activity, stressed and anxious about getting everything done.

Living In the Bottom Half of the Hourglass
In these final months of the year – “where did the year go!? – it’s natural to adopt scarcity thinking towards time. But wouldn’t it be just as easy to adopt an attitude of abundance? In Repacking your Bags, authors Richard Leider and David Shapiro ask why do we imagine ourselves living in the top half of the hourglass where time is always running out? Why don’t we see ourselves in the bottom half, where every minute is another minute streaming in. Every hour is followed by another hour, and each day is the first of more to come.

One minute is always 60 seconds, a day always 24 hours – the only thing you can change is your perception of time. As Albert Einstein said, “When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.” Okay, he was talking about relativity, but consciously enjoying each moment as it arrives will give each day a fullness that short-circuits the sense that time is slipping away.

Just stop. Yes, I know, you can’t stop, you’ve got too much to do! But amidst all the frantic multi-tasking, you’re likely to find yourself feeling frazzled and out of control. And are you really getting things done or just worrying about how much you have to do? As Kerry Gleeson, an expert on personal efficiency, points out, “This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.” So hit the pause button, take a deep breath and tell yourself, “I’ve got time!”

Get sensory. Too often, caught up in wanting to get things done, we shift into automatic pilot, going through the motions with a minimum of consciousness and feeling disconnected from our life. Again, use your body – specifically, your five senses – to connect you to the present moment. The holiday season is full of opportunities for sensory stimulation: the familiar comfort of Christmas carols; the pungent aroma of gingerbread, cinnamon and pine; and, of course, the chance to finally indulge in the taste sensation that is…fruitcake! What will literally ground you, however, is getting tactile with even the most mundane of activities. Washing post-party dishes? Feel the warmth of the water washing over your hands, the roughness of the sponge, the smoothness of a china plate. Revel in the softness of your favorite cashmere sweater, flannel shirt or fleece slippers. Take a conscious moment to savor each sensory experience and remind yourself that you’re a human being, not a robot!

Protect your time. Time is our most precious commodity -- it is, after all, most literally your life. But as Matthieu Ricard says in Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill: “Despite its great value, time has no way of protecting itself, like a child that can be led away by any bystander.”

Recognize that you do, in fact, have the power of choice – you are not actually obligated to stay for hours at every party or follow every tradition. You may have to decline a few invitations and skip a few customs in lieu of doing what’s important for you, say, a quiet night at home recharging your batteries. But if you don’t guard your time from being kidnapped, who will?

This time next year, when we’re asked, “Where did the time go?”, let’s be ready with an answer.