Christmas truly is “the most won-der-ful time of the year” (sorry if you’re nearly maxed out on the seasonal tunes and jingles)! But really… it is!
Many families have their biggest gatherings over Christmas, they cook their biggest meals over Christmas, others save up lots of their vacation time for a long Christmas break, and everyone saves up their money for Christmas gifts while planing their gift-buying months in advance (I’ve even heard tales of people who have it together so much that they buy gifts a year in advance – woah).
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As we highlighted in an early post (Christmas Prep – Less Stress, Increase Peace), it’s only human to get caught up in the tidal wave of busyness that can so easily takeover our schedules and moods before dropping us right back off at work. But who the heck wants to do that?! Over the Thanksgiving break, I experienced something that I hope to repeat this break and I want to share it with you as a way to help get the most out of this cherished time of the year.
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How frequently do we stop to think about the fact that time is our most limited resource? How many times in your life have you said, “There just aren’t enough hours in the day”? It’s a perfectly normal occurrence but it can prompt us to continually work toward being masters of this limited resource. In this post, I’m speaking strictly to vacation time. This is time we spend that should rejuvenate us and charge our batteries. Using the analogy of “sharpening the saw”, if we think about our non-vacation-time as time when we’re laboring hard and efficiently at tasks (i.e. sawing), our vacation time is when we stop sawing and do things that sharpen the teeth of our saw blades.
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So, that’s a warm and fuzzy concept but how exactly do we do it? There are many different ways people accomplish this and please don’t take this post as offending to your intelligence – I know we are all very bright and and experienced people – but the experience I want to share can best be summed up as carefree timelessness. At the beginning of the Thanksgiving break I kept feeling this urge to look at every moment of my vacation as time I should be spending productively. I had all this time at home now and it was a real struggle to fight the desire to create a lengthy to-do list of the things around the house that I always want to do but can never find the time to tackle. I fought this fire blazing inside me for a full 1-2 days over Thanksgiving break until I finally shifted out of productivity mode and into carefree timelessness.
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I haven’t read the book for many years but the concept of carefree timelessness is looked at very well by author Matthew Kelly in his book The Rhythm of Life – Living Each Day with Passion and Purpose. Here is an excerpt depicting what I’m speaking about:
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“Most of us know that the happiest people on the planet are those who are focused on their personal relationships. Relationships thrive under one condition: carefree timelessness. Do we gift our relationships with carefree timelessness?…We have to make carefree timelessness a priority. The nature of carefree timelessness is to be timeless. You lose track of time. Carefree timelessness is carefree. It has nothing to achieve other than the enjoyment of each other’s company. Teenagers are experts at this. How often do parents ask their teenagers when they are going out with friends, “Where are you going?” The children reply, “I don’t know!” Of course, we may consider this an unacceptable answer, but it may well be the truth. Carefree timelessness. It is the reason young people fall in love so easily. The lack of carefree timelessness is the reason the rest of us fall out of love so easily. Carefree timelessness cause us to fall in love with life and others. The first thing that you need to do is schedule it. Now I hear the objection in the back of your mind. You are thinking, if I have to schedule it then it is not carefree timelessness. Not so. Think back to our definition of carefree timelessness, as time spent without an agenda. I didn’t say that it is unscheduled and will happen all on it’s own. We know it won’t. We have to schedule it, but we don’t have to have an agenda.”
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This idea that “carefree timelessness cause us to fall in love with life and others” is precisely what I hope for you and your family during this Christmas season. As Matthew Kelly so wisely points out, “The first thing that you need to do is schedule it” and with the break right around the corner, that should be a little easier.
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Christmas is the beginning of the romantic story of God’s love for humanity and we save up so much for this wonderful time of year in different ways. Forgetting about productivity, you do lose track of time but you get to the other side ready to take on the challenges of daily life again and ready to live the gift of life to the fullest.
Posted by Mr. Olsen
