How Does a Leopard Change Its Spots?

Or, Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks The old dog would be me. The new trick would be my concept of time. When I was a new dog, life was lived often in kairos: time without measure, also sometimes referred to as “God’s time.” Crops growing, animals gestating, the seasons—all follow a schedule not imposed by a clock. Chronological time, chronos, has no meaning. Impatience holds no sway over kairos. Distance was measured in miles. Given the speed limit in the boondocks, the number of miles traveled equaled roughly the number of minutes to get there. When I was a medium dog, I moved to the big city. The miles=minutes concept took a beating, but a number of years passed before I finally accepted that five miles could easily take half an hour to travel. However, I still lived in kairos. Put me in front of a keyboard and the clock had no relevance. A number of years ago, as a new manager, I was sent to management classes. About the only thing I remember from them is a concept I’ve pondered but not lived until relatively recently. Dr. Karl Robinson, a psychologist who taught a couple of the classes, discussed being on time. The world, in terms of time management, is divided into two kinds of people: those who plan their schedules so as not to be late, and those who try to be on time. The former category is always early, and the latter, nearly always late. Well, I knew which category I fell into. I also knew some of the reasons I tried to be on time: I was afraid to be early, because I was just plain socially awkward. I loved interaction within programs because it gave me a legitimate reason and structure for interaction. Outside that framework, I truly feared the types of cuts and snubs I’d endured growing up. As a grown-up it took a long time for me to grasp that painful kinds of interactions weren’t so inevitable—adults don’t always behave as children, who I knew could be most cruel. As I’ve learned to let go of that extremely self-protective stance, the habit has remained of trying to arrive just in time. Add to that the fact that I always pushed the envelope—just one more page, just one more note before breaking off, to head onto the next item in my schedule. I found it quite difficult to stop doing something if I couldn’t find a natural break point. Or sometimes it was like trying to find any way possible to stay up beyond my bedtime (another child-like behavior I retained well into adulthood, easily aided by my night-owl nature). Well, circumstances at work have changed that. From a place that only a few people arrived at on time (though many, like myself, always made up the time) it has gone to zero tolerance on tardiness. Doesn’t matter if you put in a lot of overtime or work through lunch; one minute late more than five times a year (excluding verifiable transit delays) incurs consequences. As Rabbi Edwin Friedman would say, people usually change only when put in a situation where they must. Interesting to watch this experiment first hand, though I would have preferred not being one of the lab rats. The upshot is that I am now someone who schedules myself so as not to be late. And my co-workers who swore they just couldn’t get anywhere on time mostly found a way to make it happen. I no longer reside in kairos; chronos contains my life. I have moved. How does a leopard change its spots? You know the old joke—by moving, of course.