As I mentioned in last week’s experiment, recently I was faced with a mountain of deadlines right before heading into an exceptionally busy month. I found myself stressing out about it, and worrying that I would never be able to get everything done. That’s when I went to the workshop where we explored how “outcome follows purpose.” At that workshop, the leader worked with me on the idea of clearly defining the outcomes I needed, to set them solidly as intentions, and then to let them go. As I mentioned last week, letting them go meant not to spend time worrying about them, but rather to hand them over to synchronicity and flow, and to allow myself simply to move through my activities with my intentions in mind.

I must say that the results were quite amazing. During one day off, where I had the space to just do what needed to be done, I set the intentions and then didn’t bother with the clock that day. I was amazed to notice that by the end of the day I had accomplished everything that was at the top of the list of things that absolutely *had* to be done. I’ve continued to experiment with how outcome follows purpose, and have discovered that the process has to do with my fundamental relationship with time. Rather than falling into what I’ve come to experience as the “tyranny of time”, I’ve dropped into a more “timeless” flow where I’m practicing setting intentions, handing them over, and then seeing what happens. It requires me to stop myself from the habit of saying to myself that I’m running out of time, or that I don’t have enough time, and returning consistently to my intention to understand timelessness and handing it over. Then, I just go about my business without constantly checking the time.

And so, for this week’s part of the experiment about how outcome follows purpose, I invite you to experiment with your relationship to time, or rather timelessness. Rather than experiencing the usual crunch of linear, time-related chores or deadlines, this week’s experiment plays directly with a sense of timelessness, with flow. Remember, time is a construct, and it’s also a highly-charged emotional trigger for lots of people. I may have mentioned in an earlier experiment a phrase a colleague told me. She talked about “time poverty”, a condition lots of people suffer these days, in that more of us seem to be working harder, with less time for leisure and more concern about deadlines. This experiment is an antidote to this kind of “time poverty”.

In order to play with this experiment, allow yourself to do the following and notice what happens. Rather than engaging in any kind of actual “effort” here, give yourself permission to engage this week’s experiment lightly, with a sense of adventure. As you begin your day, notice what relationship you’d like to have with time. Would you like to play with timelessness, or would you like to engage time in another way – perhaps you want to explore how it feels to move through an hour of time in a particular way? Or, perhaps you’d like to play with what’s called “time distortion”, where five minutes can become the experience of 20 minutes. Milton Erickson, a psychiatrist who taught hypnosis, used to say that time distortion happens to us all the time. He said, for example, that if you’re sitting on a hot stove, five seconds feels like a very long time, and if you’re sitting in an inspiring lecture where you want to hear more, an hour can feel like just a few minutes.

One of the side benefits of doing this kind of experiment is that it exercises the muscle of internal awareness to those small urges that move us in the right direction. The more responsive we can become to these internal signals, the more we can live outcomes that follow purposes intended to support our deepest well-being. How many times have we all overridden this “small, still voice” in the past and lived to regret that we didn’t listen to ourselves? And so, please enjoy this experiment and engage it with a sense of play. Remember that animals in nature learn what they need for survival through play, and the quality of play with this kind of experiment tends to allow us to be more open and curious, rather than serious and locked in to the demand for a particular outcome.