Finding the Next Bar: Time

Once I started looking at jobs, I started looking at what my job was actually taking from me, and one of the biggest things was time. My whole day was organised around the nine to five. I got up with enough time to shower, get dressed, eat breakfast and get myself ready for work. Even though I was feeding and dressing myself, those first hours of the morning weren’t really centred on me. They were preparation for my job. Then I worked, came home and started preparing myself to do it again.

I ate dinner. I packed lunch for the next day. I watched TV because I thought I needed to switch my brain off so it would be rested and ready to use again at work the next morning. Even my free time was organised around my job. Once I saw that, I started asking what would happen if I stopped centring work and started centring myself.

One of the first changes was really simple.

I stopped spending my evenings watching television and started using that time to read and research things that interested me and that benefited my life, rather than my job. That led me into fermentation - I learned to make kefir, yoghurt and kombucha. These weren’t enormous acts of rebellion. I was just learning useful skills. But something was changing.

The hours outside work weren’t leftovers anymore. They were mine.

I started using them to build a life that might eventually require less dependence on the nine to five in the first place. I did the same thing when I decided to get my firearms licence. As a single woman, I did the course and learned what I needed to learn independently. That mattered to me. I was using my evenings and weekends to build skills and confidence for myself, rather than using that time simply to recover enough to go back to work.

My relationship with time also started changing in another way. I started paying attention to sunrise. I wanted my body to be more connected to the actual day, rather than having a clock determine everything. So I started noticing when the sun came up. I listened to the birds and learned which calls I heard at different times in the morning. I paid attention to where the sun was in the sky. I learned to orient myself, to work out where north was, and to get a sense of the time without immediately reaching for a clock.

None of this means clocks disappeared from my life - I still have a job. I still have places I need to be at particular times. But I don’t want my paid job to be the thing that everything else in my life is organised around.

Money, jobs and time are connected. If I need money, I need the job. If I need the job, I organise my time around being ready for it.

And if all the time outside the job is spent recovering from it or preparing to go back to it, when exactly do I build the skills that might help me need it less? For me, reclaiming time started there. Not with some enormous change. With an evening, a book instead of the television, yoghurt fermenting on the bench, learning something that was for me, and getting up and noticing the sun and the birds instead of only noticing the clock.

I’m still living with clock time. I’m just trying not to let it be the only way I know where I am in my day, or what my time is for.