Even if I live to be 100, I don’t know if I’ll ever lose the feeling.
Specifically, that September means “back to school.”
It has been quite a while since I was enrolled in any formal academic program that had a traditional autumnal start, and yet I still feel deeply connected to this mindset.
My passion for office supplies is year-round and eternal, but even so I’m particularly tempted now to buy a new series of notebooks for classes I’m not enrolled in.
I suppose there’s been a shift from beginning a new semester to “it’s time to get back to work,” but the energy definitely overlaps.
Beyond this, the view from my writing desk includes a community college campus that’s suddenly again full of life.
All of this has inspired this month’s new theme, Dancing With Time — Meditation HERE.
Perhaps each individual’s relationship to time is unique, changing throughout our lives.
Indeed, I wrote this recently in my journal:
Days can take forever
yet decades can rush by in a flash.
Although I’m interested in far more than just events and productivity, time itself fascinates me.
That’s partly why for this month’s Transformation Book Club we’re reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.
(You can join us HERE.)
I’ve just begun the book, but its central premise is revealed in its title:
Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks…
Expressing the matter in such startling terms makes it easy to see why philosophers from ancient Greece to the present have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence.
Burkeman writes that “the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short,” leading us to try to grasp advice on how to make the most of it through productivity tips and life hacks.
Unfortunately, most of those techniques, rather than optimizing those 4,000 weeks, often end up making things worse.
It’s attributed to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower who apparently used it as his approach to prioritization, but it was popularized and came to my attention through Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
My first encounter with the Eisenhower Matrix (or the Urgent-Important Matrix) was daunting, perhaps even temporarily paralyzing.
Rather than just listing all your tasks, you must first evaluate how they fit into two distinct categories: Urgent and Important.
Sometimes that’s quite obvious; often — especially when you first attempt the exercise — it’s a deep soul search.
Based only on two categories (urgent and important) and their opposites, it forces you to evaluate your activities with a surprisingly fresh perspective.
Ideally, this Four Quadrant or Eisenhower Matrix teaches us to do what’s urgent, plan what’s important, delegate the rest, and drop what doesn’t matter… but at first, for me at least, it was mind-blowing.
Not to be outdone by Ike, I have come up with my own time management system.
More accurately, I have adopted an ancient one as my own.
I freely confess to being a sucker for all personality classification systems — ranging from classical astrology to the mystically channeled Human Design; from the science-based Myers-Briggs to DISC and the Big Five.
Anyway, almost two decades ago when I was leading a yoga retreat in Guatemala, a trust-fund hippie gave me a Mayan astrology reading that’s haunted me ever since.
Recently, I’ve done more research on the Mayan calendar and fallen deeply into its ancient, dazzling rabbit hole.
Although aware of celestial phenomena, the Mayan system isn’t based on what’s happening with the planets and constellations.
A year is not based on the earth being in the same position in its orbit around the sun.
Instead, it’s about 20 signs that cycle over 13 weeks, making for a 260-day year.
I was born on day 90 of that cycle, and thus every 260 days later it’s my birthday once again.
For me, this iconoclastic calendar has been revolutionary.
Celebrating my birthday every 260 days completely shatters the autopilot of standardized time.
For one, my Day 90 birth date energy occurs on different days of the Gregorian calendar every year.
I also really love the idea of a shorter year for goal setting.
Working with 260 days feels so much leaner and more focused.
It also means that fiscal quarters — so deeply ingrained in business, finance, and even how we think of progress — are now a much more economical 65 days.
All this fits in with our shared sense that, for better or worse, time does seem to be flowing more rapidly.
Most importantly, since everything is no longer aligned with the cues from the mass cultural calendar, I’m forced to stay awake to the actual timing of things.
That alone is a neuroplasticity workout.
Instead of reusing default grooves, I’m building new time-sense pathways.
Finally, the icing on the (literal) cake: since my Mayan birthday recurs every 260 days, in certain years (like 2026) I have two of them — three if you count my traditional calendar one — giving me all the more occasions to celebrate.
Perhaps paradoxically, while I’m planning three birthday parties for myself in 2026, at the same time I’ve written before how I’m working on a big long-term project about being non-chronological™.
Ironically, I feel that my Mayan time hack, however, reinforces this.
Long before her recent controversies, over a decade ago, Christiane Northrup said in AARP magazine:
I tell people to stop celebrating
so-called milestone birthdays after the age of 25.
Even more radically, Mariah Carey has famously expressed her refusal to acknowledge birthdays at all.
As she famously quipped:
“I don’t have a birthday, no.
Anniversaries, yes.”
In fact, in recent interviews, she’s now saying:
“I don’t know time.
I don’t know numbers.
I do not acknowledge time.”
I find her audacity inspiring and delightful, particularly since clearly — given that All I Want for Christmas Is You has earned her an estimated $3 million a year since its 1994 release — Mariah Carey definitely knows the value of a season.
Oddly, unlike bidding against yourself at an auction, by embracing the Mayan system of having more frequent birthdays, I feel so much richer.
By this calendar, I will be celebrating my 90th next year on Sunday, November 8, 2026, and — get ready for this — my 100th birthday just eight years from now, on Wednesday, December 21, 2033.
Like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral, this is playful, mischievous, and perhaps a little dark — but at least I get to be a guest at my own party.
Burkeman writes that “The more you seek control over your time, the more you’ll feel out of control.”
I think that’s even more true if you’ve never explored the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important.
Physicists, philosophers, and poets all tell us that time is an illusion, but certainly it is a mighty powerful one.
I’m attempting to rewire my brain through non-standard measurement — training myself to track progress in a way that’s immune to “normal” metrics, while still being just as specific and actionable.
Burkeman might be correct that productivity is a trap.
Even so I’d like to think we can at least improvise some bold new steps — ones that no one’s ever seen before, ones that delight us deeply — if we’re willing to explore Dancing With Time.