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Happy Monday!

This is our last post in the five week Time series. So far we have four tools for helping us know abundance in time:

Tool #1: Let the time we have be enough

Tool #2: Ability to shift our perception of time

Tool #3: Value the process as much as the goal

Tool #4: Give up (the illusion of) control

This week we head into the territory of Now, where everything takes place. Our thoughts, feelings, experiences and conversations, our planning for the future and our analysis of the past – our whole lives are lived here – in the Now. 

Now is where we feel busy and stressed, where we experience lack of time and the frustration of not being able to accomplish everything we want to. Now is where we rush to get ahead and multi-task to save time.

This then is the most important place to learn to know abundance in time. Here, Now, where everything happens.

Our tool here, Now, is choice.

We choose how we view time. We choose what we do. We choose how busy we are. We choose to rush. We choose how to think about something. We choose how to respond.

The complicated web of our daily lives is made up of choices.

I know, sometimes it seems like we have no choice. We have meetings to attend, phone calls and emails to return, bills to pay, deadlines to meet. Our lives are dictated by what we have to do and we scramble for “free” time to fit in what we love to do. We don’t see options, we have to do these things.

But why? Why do we have to do these things? Because for whatever reason (and reasons vary for each person, family, organization, business, religion, culture, country) we have decided that we need to, that we have to, do what we are doing. We make this choice.

Of course there are many things that happen that we do not choose, that we would not choose. Our lives are impacted by choices that other people make or by natural forces or events that we can’t control or change.

We loose our job or our house, our largest donor stops giving because of stock market declines, our dog dies, or our sister develops cancer.

These things and others are happening and we did not choose them.

We can’t control what is happening but we can choose how we perceive, how we think about, how we respond to, and how we participate in, what is happening.

We do have, in every moment, in every situation, this choice.

Choice is our most powerful tool for knowing abundance in time.

How we view time is one of the choices we make.

Can you see how your choices – in your thinking, in your beliefs or opinions, in your actions and responses – creates your Now?

What are you choosing?

(This post is #5 in a 5 part series on Time)

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p.s. The tool of choice is about your choice. This is not an exercise in sitting back and judging other people’s choices or saying that your choices are better than someone else’s choices.

You already know from your own experience that sometimes it is hard to see choice when you are in the midst of something. We all do the best we can with what we have, with where we are and with what we know.