Eternal kindness
How changing my relationship to time changed everything
photo by Nick Fewings
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
- From ‘The Moral Song’ (1857), by William Edward Hickson
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over
and expecting different results.”
- From ‘Sudden Death’ (1983) by Rita Mae Brown - not Albert Einstein!
How do I succeed at that which I long to do, but for which there is no blueprint to guide me?
This question might capture a familiar predicament if you are a parent of a struggling child or an entrepreneur (especially a solopreneur) trying to market an original idea, if you are trying to reinvent your marriage, overcome a mysterious health challenge or navigate a major life transition.
Every one of these situations is unavoidably a process of trial and error.
The quotations from Hickson and Brown above are useful at times, but like most clichés, they are too crude to apply always. Threading the needle between these signposts requires the art of asking the right questions at each step of the journey through uncharted territory.
OK, so how do I determine the right question?
This question highlights the unavoidable problem that everyday life is always an improvisation. But that very problem suggests a better question:
What principle can I bring to bear in any situation despite the unpredictable ups and downs of my energy, the mood of other people, the weather, the stock market, etc?
Answering that question with a question:
What happens if I treat time as eternity rather than past, present and future?
Let’s take the example of the solopreneur:
In this era of rapidly redefining categories when more and more people are realizing that their job is crushing their soul, the idea of “being your own boss” seems to offer a measure of freedom that can’t be found elsewhere. Yet it requires certain skills and discipline. When your job is no longer defined by an employer, your job is, in fact, to define the job. As a solopreneur you are also still an employee, so it’s no use to be a tyrannical boss squeezing every last drop of blood from the “workforce”. Yet, you can’t ignore the question of “productivity” either. You also must understand something about what the world wants, so that your product or service is a good match.
Let’s assume that sometimes you will need to “try, try again” to get an honest appraisal of the potential success of your current strategy. But, let’s also assume that you will sometimes realize that continuing to do what you’ve always done is “insane” because it isn’t bringing the results you want.
So, what’s the sweet spot?
In between these two modes of operations, eternity is the ground of a kind of relentless kindness that can meet any setback. When time is eternal (“Don’t worry, we’ve got all the time in the world”) a mistake is not a failure, it’s an opportunity to learn.
And there is always time to learn.
Of course you will receive all kinds of signals from your environment that time is not eternal, that it is, in fact, “running out.” It’s time to pick up the kids from school, the client session starts in a half hour, taxes are due next month.
Yet, from the point of view that time is eternal, you can stop and ask, “what happens - in my body, mind, heart and soul - when I think that ‘time is running out’?”
And what if you didn’t think that?
Even if it doesn’t feel true that there is eternity between today and tax day, to ask the question is to recalibrate time by asserting that there is always time to notice how I feel. Without noticing my emotional state, what I feel becomes as impossible to control as the weather. When I have time to admit that the world won’t end if I don’t pay my taxes on time, even if that was my preference, it is easier to breathe.
Likewise, if I assume my child’s maturation doesn’t need to be complete by the end of this week, I can be softer and more available to meet her where she is right now. Perhaps her exams are coming up next week, but her soul is timeless and so is mine.
When time is eternal, past “failures” aren’t failures. They are lessons that inform the future. I don’t have to hate my past self for bequeathing me this present moment. If I don’t possess the skills I need right now, I can take the time I need to learn them.
Each time I fall back into time scarcity and curse my fate as a late bloomer, I can “stop time” again and ask myself how that thought changes everything else I do. If I never learned how to do this before, as unfortunate as that may seem, it is kinder to make time now for that learning rather than assume that unchangeable past circumstances have sealed my fate forever.
Yes, sometimes kindness does recognize clock time - but it is more likely to do so by saying “Let’s come back to this later” rather than “Hurry up! Get it done!”
Can you think of any instances where this logic seems disastrous?
I’m sure you can. I could come up with thousands of them. And the longer my list gets, the more overwhelmed and hopeless I feel.
This is precisely why kindness must be relentless.
Because those thousands of circumstances always arise one at a time - a reality that becomes impossible to see whenever I think that “time is always running out.” If I meet each of those moments with kindness, they are less likely to pile up and create a monstrosity that looks impossible to deal with.
Whenever I am willing to take a conscious breath, feel my feet on the ground and notice how my energy matches the energy of my surroundings, I can adjust my pacing to fit my needs in this moment and step back into the stream of eternity.
I developed the Relentless Kindness workshop after a lifetime of confronting my own unkindness. I finally realized that there is always a way to reframe my circumstances more kindly. Sometimes it’s an adjustment in my thinking. Sometimes it’s about how I treat my body. Sometimes it’s a shift in my emotional process.
What I discovered is that cultivating relentless kindness - the commitment to be kind to myself and others again and again and again - is a superpower that keeps me grounded in difficult times so I can overcome obstacles and keep moving forward.
I hope you’ll join me for the workshop, which offered twice:
Tuesday January 27 at 1pm EST & Thursday, January 29 at 7:30pm EST.