Time - on time

Since my school days I had this habit of ensuring that I do not get to school late, by keeping my watch 5-10 mins ahead. Well, if you do/did something similar, you knew the logic of how this works. :) During the exams, I would move ALL the clocks in the house to 15 minutes ahead. As I grew, my habit grew and the duration grew too. Now, when I had to help my wife prepare our kid for school and then I had to get ready to office - the time differenece grew to half an hour! But typically this never worked - except for first couple of days of adopting a new (increased) duration. I would end up being late, or hurrying to wherever that I had to go.

Then an interesting thing happened.

My parents came to stay with us recently, and the first thing my dad did was to set our clock back to normal time. That day onwards I found myself never getting late to office! Not a single day in the past three weeks! What was going on here?!

I figured out the logic(!) for my perennial delays. I would get up and _always_ feel that there is still 30 minutes more to get ready, and this complacency would end up getting me late. Now when I knew that the time that is on the face of the clock IS the right time - WYSIWYG - I would plan appropriately and act quickly. It was real-time.

Time - on time.

Kids are the best teachers!

With my little princess growing up fast, I find that it is me who is learning more from this relationship.. She is all of three and a half and brings me surprises (most of them pleasant :) ) every day. One of the basic things she has taught me is patience, loads of it. Consider typing this post with one hand, because she is tying my other hand with a thread, when usually I get terribly irritated if someone disturbs me while doing something.

This evening we'd been to the close by park, where she likes playing on the slide. Having taken the camera without the SD card, there was nothing for me to do, so I sat there watching her play. She played on the slides for about 5 minutes and I could see that she was getting bored. I was surprised to see her doing improvisation - first she slid down in the sitting position - a leg folded over the other. Slid down lying face down. Found a way to skip one step while climbing up. Climbed up from the front of the slide. - Innumerable ways of improvisation. This got me thinking, we claim to be bored with everything: work, relationship, day-to-day 'routine' - if only we could think and act a bit differently - improvise.

Yes, there is so much we could learn from kids - if only we could take some time off from our 'busy' lives and pay attention.