In my last post, I talked about how time is a frustration point for me. Thanks to all of you who reassured me that I am not alone in this. I decided to reach back in time and bring you a story of time and some kitty image troubles.

“Time is time. You understand it? We have to be first to the_______” A tour guide said this multiple times each day while we were in his charge and it has become quite the family joke. The time thing raised it’s head as I was working on completing one of my teaching activities last weekend. There were lots of fiddly details to complete and things were not going as smoothly as I would have liked.

I had used a pre-made template that turned out to have been done by someone who had evidently failed geometry. (Yes, I should have known better.) Fortunately my husband did not fail geometry and made it all right. Then, I needed to color in my white cat images to match the geography of my patterns. I thought this would be a quick manipulation but no. All of the computer photo tricks I had up my sleeve bombed horribly.

Bb cat

That was when it hit me. It didn’t matter if I finished it today, tomorrow, or even next week. I had time—as much as I needed. I didn’t have to be first to anywhere. The only deadline I perceived was merely a reflection of my own desires. What a luxury to be in that position! I spend my professional life (and probably you do too) being on time for lessons, meeting college mandated deadlines for student performance, testing, and grading, as well as accompanying, class and workshop preparation, and more. But, I don’t need to let that mentality creep into everything I do.

Back to my project and my kitty image problems. I took the afternoon and evening off. We enjoyed a great meal and watched a movie. The next morning out of the blue came the answer to my image trouble. Save the things as PDFs and use an iPad app to color them instead of trying to fill them with a computer program. It worked like a charm and I am tickled with the results.

My teaching year will go on. Time pressures will again be present. It will be easy to get into a deadline mentality and see limits where there are none. But, time is time. I’m going to do my best to truly understand it.

You can see more on my cats and how they turned out here.

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