When you’re always behind, even your breath starts running.
It started with spoons. Every morning, Maya rushed to prepare breakfast for her kids, answer Slack messages from bed, and juggle lunch prep with last-minute school forms. One day, she opened the dishwasher and found every single spoon dirty. It wasn’t a crisis—but she cried anyway.
Later, she laughed through the tears, realizing it wasn’t about the spoons. It was the exhaustion of living like a machine with no off switch. She had calendars, reminders, productivity apps, and yet always felt like she was behind. Not behind on tasks—behind on life.
The Time Scarcity Trap
We often say we don’t have enough time. But more often, it’s not a lack of hours—it’s a lack of space inside those hours.
Psychologists call this feeling “time poverty.” It’s not measured in minutes, but in mindset. When your inner life is crammed with urgency, even leisure feels like a checklist item. A Harvard study found that people who experience “time affluence”—the perception of having enough time—are significantly happier, even if their schedules are objectively full.
In short, it’s not about how much time you have. It’s about how safe you feel inside that time.
The Myth of Doing It All
Modern life trains us to stack our days like Jenga towers. Reply to emails while waiting in line. Take calls on walks. Fold laundry while listening to webinars. The problem isn’t that we multitask. It’s that we never arrive.
Every task becomes a bridge to the next thing. And over time, you forget what it’s like to stand still and actually feel your own life.
The Power of One Honest Task
Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “When you wash the dishes, just wash the dishes.” He didn’t mean it as a productivity tip. He meant: be here.
Doing one thing at a time isn’t laziness. It’s devotion.
When Maya stopped checking email during breakfast and just made oatmeal with cinnamon for her kids, something shifted. The oatmeal wasn’t faster. But time felt deeper. Thicker. Like it could hold her, instead of just slipping past.
This isn’t about minimalism. It’s about meaning.
A Spiritual Truth: Time Expands With Presence
Ancient spiritual traditions have echoed this truth for centuries. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna to act and put everything in that act. Act with heart and soul.
Buddhism teaches us to release attachment to urgency. Even modern neuroscience supports it: focused attention literally alters our experience of time, slowing it down and making it feel more spacious.
When we’re fully present—even for five minutes—we taste eternity.
From Urgency to Intimacy
What if instead of organizing our lives around urgency, we organized them around intimacy?
That might mean:
Saying no to tasks that don’t nourish your values.
Blocking off sacred time each day with no goal except breathing.
Trusting that doing less isn’t failure—it’s a quiet act of rebellion.
You can’t out-hustle the emptiness. But you can befriend it.
Maya’s Spoons, Revisited
Now, Maya keeps a small jar of clean spoons by the kettle. It’s a tiny ritual. When she makes tea, she stirs it slowly and watches the steam rise.
Not because she’s done with her to-do list. She never is. But because she’s no longer outsourcing her peace to a future moment when everything is finished.
She knows the truth now: she doesn’t need more time. She just needs to belong to the time she already has.