Hello, this is Alexandra from Enlightened Learning. Today I would like to talk to you about time. Many of my students, especially those who have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder ADHD, find time very challenging.

I’ll never forget that time when I worked with a student at Mount Royal University, and I used to do the practice of drawing pictures for symbols for the semester. One of the symbols with a clock, and it was shrouded in clouds, unclear. I don’t know if that resonates for you, but time for many can feel like a cloud, cloudy sky unclear; where does it go? How do I use it? How do I manage it? Usually, when it comes to time and our experience of it, when emotions of stress come in, time gets cloudier. So relaxation is one tool that will help you manage your time better. You can see more clearly. So we start with relaxing the mind and the body.

2 – Time is often the enemy of many students, especially with a d h d. One of the practices that we’ve been doing with students is to make friends with time. How do we make friends with time? I love Alice in Wonderland through the Looking Glass, and the premise of the movie is about Alice having to make friends with time. Instead, she battles with. It’s a perfect example of what many students feel like when they’re going through school or life, or work.

It’s this battle against time, running here and there frantic, chaotic, confused, a struggle. And at the end of the movie, she realizes that she can’t control it or can she? And she makes friends with time.

So yes, we can control ourselves in time, and so we begin by making friends with time. I had a student recently giving me a teaching moment of where she was recognized, saying that she took advantage of time as a friend. She saw time as a friend, but she realized she wasn’t a very good friend of time. She took it for granted. And recognizing that when we don’t take it for granted and realize that it’s limited, then we change our relationship with time and honour it more, respecting it more. I’d like to end there and come back with some strategies, but it’s the first nibble of reflections on time. I’ll continue this in my next talk, and I look forward to being with you again.

Namaste