Good morning. Why does it feel worse to be early than to rush and stress and arrive a little late?
Early adopterIf my mother has plans for dinner, she’s ready to go by lunchtime — showered and dressed, hair and makeup done. The apple has fallen very far from the tree in this regard, fallen and rolled down the hill into a puddle where, I fear, it rots. I am constantly running late, frittering away every last second before departure, leaving myself on average five minutes too few to get presentable. I am usually late by a few minutes, nothing outrageous, but this “respectable” tardiness is achieved only through chaotic rushing, sometimes jogging the last few blocks to the restaurant. Rushing, I’ve found, is the root of much of the misery of modern life. Why would one persist in behavior that brings on misery? I seem to have developed the irrational opinion that being early is worse than rushing. This sounds ridiculous. But I’ve observed myself, rich with multiple unscheduled hours before an engagement, defiantly do nothing to prepare myself for said engagement until 19 minutes before departure. Nineteen minutes, in my delusional calculations, feels somehow like just enough time to shower, dress and hit the road. Here, in clearheaded reflection, I know this is folly. When I think about being ready with time to spare, I feel almost queasy. Once I’m ready, I must rush out the door. I can’t be ready and then, say, water the plants, or sit down and read a book. I’m ready! Let’s go! When I imagine arriving someplace early, instead of envisioning a leisurely trip, a few minutes to collect myself before others arrive, I see myself unmoored, standing awkwardly and in the way. The maitre d’ asks me to wait over by the coats until the rest of my party arrives. Being early, according to my fool’s logic, results in discomfort and shame. When I asked my mother why she gets ready so early, she explained, “Then I don’t have to worry about it.” Getting ready is an item on a to-do list, and once she checks it off, she can move on with the rest of her day. I wonder if the modern fixation with productivity, with using every minute, has affected us both in different ways. My mother wants to get the chore done so she doesn’t have it hanging over her. I fear the loose, unstructured minutes that being early creates. I am so used to time being scarce, to feeling accomplishment when I cram as much as possible into a given day, that I create scarcity even when there isn’t any. I read this lovely meditation on time from a few years ago in which the writer Yohanca Delgado suggests looking to geologic time in an effort to recontextualize our commitment to hustle culture. “What if obsessively keeping time matters less than we think it does when we consider the time scale of the cosmos?” she writes. When you’re measuring time in the billions of years, those few unstructured minutes one must endure when arriving early recede in importance. I’m planning to do an “early experiment” over the next few weeks, where I fight every impulse I have to run out the clock, where I make myself arrive at least 15 minutes early for every obligation. I want to see what happens if I sit with the uncertainty of extra time. What if the relief I get from not rushing is so delicious that I am able to break the habit? “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late,” Shakespeare wrote in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” I’ll admit this sounds more like punishment than wisdom, but I intend to find out.
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