Filling time, not just finding it

As a physician, I used to pride myself on being an effective time manager. My days had structure and direction, a sense of forward movement that could be tracked in small, completed units–patients seen, charts closed, decisions made. Even outside of medicine, life organized itself in a similar way. There were always things that needed to be done and doing them gave the day its shape.Like many of us in medicine, I measured my time in what I could complete. I was good at it. I still am, when I need to be. But for the first time in a very long while, I’ve found myself in a stretch of time where that way of moving through the day no longer quite applies. I’ve taken a short pause from clinical work, and this has slowed things down in a way I didn’t entirely expect but have had to learn to live within.What I didn’t anticipate was not just the change in pace, but the feeling of absence it would create.Even the seemingly endless tasks of motherhood haven’t completely filled that absence. My children are older now. They leave for school in the morning and return with stories, fragments of their day that I am invited into but no longer responsible for shaping. There are still moments of connection—rides, conversations, shared meals, but they no longer define the entire rhythm of my day.What remains is time that is unstructured. Not empty, exactly. But no longer anchored.In medicine, there is always something to be done. Even when you’re not in the clinic, the work continues in quieter forms such as reading, charting, preparing for clinic and thinking through decisions not yet made. It gives time a kind of continuity, a sense that even the still moments are contributing to something larger.Without that structure, though, I’ve realized how much of my sense of purpose was embedded in that constant forward motion of medicine. It is more than just a purpose, but a validation. An identity. A way of knowing yourself, at the end of the day, believing that time has been used well.Outside of clinic, life still offers tasks: There is always something to organize, clean, plan or complete. But without the weight of clinical work, those tasks feel different. They fill time, but they don’t seem to answer the same question.At first, I tried to recreate what I knew. I structured the day. I made lists. Filled the hours in ways that could be accounted for. There is comfort in that, and there always will be. It brings a familiar rhythm, a way of reasserting control over something that suddenly felt unmoored.But the more I tried, the more it became clear that this wasn’t simply about how I was spending my time. Rather, it was about how I was measuring it.As I leaned more heavily into mindfulness and meditation practice, I came across a quote from Pema Chödrön:“Don’t just do something, sit there.”It stayed with me, not because it felt intuitive, but because it didn’t. It runs counter to almost everything I’ve been trained to do. In medicine, when there is uncertainty, we act. When there is time, we fill it. When there is space, we organize it into something useful.Sitting still, without purpose or outcome, doesn’t feel neutral. It feels like something is missing. I noticed that feeling of missing time one afternoon while sitting in the car waiting for my kids at an after-school pick-up. The engine was off: my daughter was in the car while we waiting for my two sons. I felt a sense of impatience, wondering what was taking them so long to leave school? In the meantime, my daughter started telling me a story; something long and loosely structured, looping back on itself, the way children’s stories do when they are more about thinking out loud than arriving anywhere in particular.Normally, I would have nudged it along. Asked a clarifying question. Moved us, gently, toward the end. Instead, I just listened. It was clear to me that there was nowhere else I needed to be and no where I was going. There was nothing waiting on the other side of that moment.And still, I could feel it—that quiet, familiar pull to move things forward. To close the loop. To make the time go somewhere. Even though I didn’t act on it, I didn’t feel settled, either.That, more than anything, has been the shape of this slower time.It has not brought a sense of peace. Nor has there been clarity. But rather, a kind of suspended space where the usual markers of a “good day” no longer apply, and nothing has quite replaced them. I find myself reaching, almost instinctively, for something to anchor it, something that will tell me that the day has been used well. That it has meant something in the bigger picture.But meaning, I’ve come to realize, is harder to locate when it isn’t tied to what can be finished. In every day, there are moments that feel full in a different way. However, they are easy to miss if I’m not paying attention. They are easy to override with structure, or plans, or the quiet urgency to make the day more efficient. When I don’t override them, when I let them unfold without trying to shape them into something more, they carry a kind of weight that I don’t yet know how to measure.I have time left on my sabbatical and I am still learning how to sit there, in that place of uncertainty around time well spent.I don’t sit as a philosophy, and not with any sense of mastery, but as something closer to a discipline—one that feels, at times, more difficult than anything I was asked to do in medicine. Because it requires me to let go of the very thing that used to tell me who I was.I used to know how to recognize a day well spent. Now, I’m no longer sure that it’s something that can be measured at all. And I’m beginning to understand that the discomfort I feel in that space isn’t a problem to solve.It’s the point.Dr. Ginevra Mills is a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist based in Victoria.

Filling time, not just finding it

Register for free access or login.

More Blog Posts In This Series

The illusion of immunity

Pain without a lesion

When the zebra is real

Related Topics