Remembering To Give Time To Time

In Spain there’s a saying “hay que dar tiempo al tiempo,” roughly translated as you should give time to time. I remember the first time heard it was in 1989 I’d just gotten my Master’s from Boston University and had moved to Madrid. I was spending my first month hosted by the family of friend and looking back I see I had made a bold and wild decision to move to a country I had never been to before and make my life there. I had beginners level Spanish and about three friends in Madrid. I had no other work contacts or leads, just a few letters of recommendation from old employers my CV.

There I was, excited, focused and not a little frustrated that a few months into this adventure, things were going slower than I had hoped. I wasn’t speaking Spanish as fluently as I thought I would, I was pounding the pavement — literally — to find organizations that would be interested in hiring an American communication specialist, but wasn’t finding many leads. I was frustrated, things had to go faster and I didn’t know how to make that happen. That’s when my friend Pablo chose to share this piece of Spanish wisdom wrapped up in this simple saying. “Hay Doris, tienes que dar tiempo al tiempo,” reminding me that that things happen in their own time and I could not control that. At the time, I was really annoyed at him. I couldn’t see why he thought he should give me this quaint piece of folk wisdom at exactly this time when I had to make time bend to my will.

I remember saying something to the effect of “what do you mean, I came here to start my life again, I’ve been here for 2 whole months and it’s just not coming together and it has to work.” I didn’t have the presence of mind in that specific moment to take a deeper look at what was happening or if I had made unrealistically ambitious goals and deadlines or that think about how I could calm myself and stay persistent. I started to realize that maybe there was something to this silly naive phrase. But the phrase stayed with me sparking my curiosity about what it means in my life, and in the lives of those I know and the places I work.

Over the years I’ve come to understand it in this way: Everything has its own time, its own rhythm and my job is to become aware of that rhythm, to notice it and work with that rhythm instead of trying to control it. It’s helped me to have peace with…