Time – You Either Have It Or You Don’t. Which Is The Case For You?

We had been at sea for nearly seven days, slow steaming from Algeria to Alexandria, Egypt and Port Said. I was an engineer aboard the S.S. Ruth Lykes, a general cargo ship (aka breakbulk ship), calling on ports in Europe and Africa. The Chief Mate estimated we would spend about three days in port, based on the cargo we had to unload and the dock crane capacity of the port.

Port Said is an Egyptian city at the northern end of the Suez Canal, on the Mediterranean Sea. Built in 1859 to house men working on the Suez Canal, it has been a major trading port for centuries, and is a hub of international commerce. We were delivering grain to be distributed throughout northern Africa on behalf of the U.S. Agency For International Development (USAID).

I had a lot of eager anticipation arriving at this port, because I had never been to Egypt and I was excited to see what were considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the pyramids at Giza. I had been on pins and needles since I joined the ship in New Orleans and found out that Alexandria would be a port of call. I couldn’t wait to see them in person!

So you can only imagine how I felt when I went into the Officer’s Mess for breakfast and overheard the Captain talking to the Chief Mate about how long we would probably be anchored.

Turns out it’s fairly common at Port Said to anchor and wait. The port is so busy that it has two anchorages; an outer anchorage and an inner anchorage. Apparently, it’s not uncommon for a ship to sit “on the hook” in the outer anchorage for a few days, then pick up anchor and re-anchor in the inner anchorage for a few more days, before finally being assigned dock space. So much for our three-day turnaround. And worse yet, it was clear I wasn’t going to get to the pyramids anytime soon! And so it was going to be “a matter of time”.

Time is a very interesting phenomenon. Most of us tend to think of time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years. Depending on how old you are, you might be visualizing an analogue clock right now, with the seconds just ticking by.

In the western world, especially here in the U.S., you hear a lot about spending time, wasting time, making time, time standing still, and time flying by. If time is nothing more than a second hand ticking away, racking up minutes, hours, and days, how is it that sometimes it flies, and sometimes it seems to take forever?

As we sit here in the first quarter of 2020, dealing with ALL the affects of COVID-19, what is your perception of time? I’d like to suggest to you that it be one of time expansion.

Now “time expansion” can be one of minutes hanging like hours because you can’t go anywhere, or it can be like you have so much more time to effectively create your desired outcomes. I choose the latter.

Please understand, the choice is yours…

p.s. – If you’d like some help with your perception of time as we move through this “very different time” please contact me!