Most of us spend the first half of our lives unconcerned about the passage of time, and the second half wishing we’d made the most of it. We waste time the same way governments waste money. One upside to infertility is that it helps people realise how precious time is.
Not fretting about time, not spending our days rushed or hurried is not the same as wasting time – but most of us are not doing this. Most of us complain about lost time and are trying to make it up daily. Most of us are stressed in some fundamental way, and much of this has to do with our perception of time as it relates to the problems we face.
Infertility brings these two things into sharp focus and thus it can be used as a moment of realisation. It is, in philosophical terms, an opportunity to replace some of the wrong ways we look at ourselves and at the world with less wrong ways. I say ‘less wrong’ because we never actually have a perfect view of the word or our place in it, but the closer our view is to reality the better we tend to get on in the world.
We squander time we can never get back because we think we can catch up later- I certainly did.
We let our health slip because we think we have more pressing matters to attend to and will always have time to fix it later. I certainly did that too!
Should we judge ourselves for this? Not even a little bit – we are always doing the best we can with what we think we have – the key is to think clearer. To judge ourselves for wasting time is to waste yet more time and compound the problem further. To accept it (which is an emotional thing) – and learn from it (which is a cognitive thing) – is what the journey calls us to do. Bringing our mind into more coherence with our heart is one way to look at the journey infertility urges us to go on.
In most cases you can fix your problem, but it involves changing things internally first, otherwise you will solve the problem only to recreate it again in a different form. Our mind follows what our heart is focussed on, and our body follows where our mind leads us – thus we must be open to solving the deeper problems in our hearts and minds first if we are to have any hope of overcoming problems in our body.
The good news is – the only real power we hold is the power to do just this.
Time and tide wait for no one. (Thank you for that gem Granddad!!)
