Time remaining
Put away the countdown clock
The first thing I do when I get on a plane is pull up the flight map.
I keep it up the entire flight, no matter how long. Watching the minutes tick down on the "time remaining." Obsessively checking: How much longer until we get there?
It's not that I'm claustrophobic or scared of flying. I'm just used to living in countdown mode.
And it doesn't stop when I'm back on the ground.
I catch myself doing it all the time - stuck in traffic on the way to preschool drop-off, sitting through a meeting that feels endless, hurrying the girls into pajamas when I still have emails waiting.
How much time is left? becomes the background hum of my days.
Living life in anticipation of the future instead of being present where I am.
When my second daughter was born, countdown mode became my default setting.
I'd wake up to the baby crying in the middle of the night, already calculating how little sleep I was getting. I'd hustle through breakfast with the toddler, rushing her out the door just to steal a quiet moment for myself.
Just get to nap time. Just get to bedtime. Just get to the weekend.
Those early months felt endless. Every day stretched on forever, marked by crying, exhaustion, and the nagging feeling that I should be enjoying it more.
I kept telling myself: We just have to survive this phase. The sleepless nights, the tantrums, the resentment piling up alongside the laundry. It'll get easier when we hit the next milestone.
But always living for what's next meant missing what was right in front of me - the small moments of connection and joy hiding in plain sight.
Last week, my beloved grandmother passed away.
At her funeral, as I sat with my family and felt the weight of her absence, one thought kept looping through my mind: I wish I had slowed down.
If I had known how little time we had left, I would have savored it more. Called her more often and really listened. Asked more questions. Held her hand longer during my last visit.
When she got sick, my grandmother was told she had twelve months to live. She was gone in just a few weeks.
Her death was a jarring reminder that there's no flight map for life. No gentle heads-up that says: You're nearing the end. Pay attention.
We spend so much of our lives looking ahead, planning for "someday" - when we get that promotion, when the kids are older, when things finally calm down.
But someday isn't guaranteed.
What if we're rushing through the very moments we'll later wish we could have back?
There's another thing I do on airplanes.
I never buy the Wi-Fi.
I love being on airplane mode. It's one of the few times in my life when I'm fully offline. No emails, no calendar reminders, no Slack messages.
Just me, the clouds, and a rare moment of stillness.
When I disconnect from the noise, something inside me softens. I can breathe a little deeper. After a while, I'm no longer asking, how much longer? I'm finally asking, how am I, right now?
Up there, unplugged and untethered, I get a glimpse of the spaciousness that's so hard to find in the thick of it, where every minute of every hour feels spoken for and the mental load is all-consuming.
When we live in countdown mode, we're not just counting minutes. We're telling ourselves we don't want to be where we are.
No wonder we feel trapped, stuck, like we have no choice but to endure it.
I don't want to live like that anymore. I don't want to spend my days racing toward the next thing, wishing away the messy, imperfect moments that make up real life.
So I'm putting away the flight map. I want to stop obsessing over how much time is left and start paying attention to where I actually am.
This means lingering a bit longer when I give my girls a hug at the end of the day. Finding gratitude for the chaos of a house full of people who love me. Taking a breath during the overwhelm instead of rushing through it.
It means creating pockets of airplane mode on the ground, where I disconnect from the noise and tune into what's happening right in front of me.
Because while we can't slow down time, we can change how we spend it. We can stop living for someday and start living for today.
We're all on a flight with an unknown arrival time. And the only time we really have - to hold, to savor, to live - is right now.
Namaste,
Tamara