EU370: There’s Plenty of Time

Exploring Unschooling

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about one of Anna’s favorite sayings, “There’s plenty of time.” This mindset shift is so helpful in many different circumstances, making it a very useful tool!

We talk about using it in busy moments, when thinking about learning and child development, and even in more urgent situations. This mindset shift to “there’s plenty of time” can help can help bring clarity and calm and shift us out of fear-based tunnel vision.

We had a lot of fun talking about it and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Unschooling Wobbles, coaching calls, and more!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello! I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully, and I am joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both!

ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello!

PAM: So, today we are going to dive into the mindset shift that has been invaluable to me over the years, and that’s that there’s plenty of time. It is something that I still regularly need to remind myself, particularly when challenging times arise. Because what it does is it helps me transition out of the tunnel vision that fear or challenge inspires in me. It’s like, oh my gosh, this thing happened. I’ve got to fix it. I’ve got to move as quick as possible. And it helps me get out of that mode and into more open and curious, so that I can lean more into the situation, into what’s actually going on, who’s involved. Because truly, even though so many things that go sideways feel like emergencies, they’re not. So, that is what we are going to be diving into.

But before we do that, we just want to invite you to check out the Living Joyfully online shop. There are courses, my books are there. There’s coaching options that are already all available. And this fall, we will be adding calendars as well as a new book, an audio book that I am putting together of all the talks that I’ve given over the years, and some audiobook editions of my existing books. I’ve got some more of those. Anyway, we are really enjoying creating a one-stop shop to support you as you navigate relationships with your loved ones and deep dive into your unschooling journey. And you can follow the link in the show notes or just go to livingjoyfullyshop.com.

And now, Anna, since I learned about this mindset shift from you many, many years ago, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would! Yeah, it is funny, because so many people associate this with me. Actually, a friend from the Network made me this card. So, if you’re on YouTube you’ll see this. Maybe we can post it. But it’s this really nice little embroidery on a card that says Plenty of Time, because I say it so often. And it’s just because of me, because I really need to.

We live in a culture that has a really strong sense of urgency and brings sense of urgency to everything from academics to when you’re in the medical system to when you’re just in your day to day, and with growth and development or anything. There’s just this imposed sense of urgency. And I think my personality just really gets caught up in that. I’m kind of a go go gal anyway. And so, I just get going and I just have this urgency. And what I’ve found is that in some arenas, it serves me. I get a lot of things done. But in relationships, it was really causing problems, because I was rolling over people and not really getting to know them or understand or take the pause that I needed to to really understand a situation. I was making assumptions. I was looking at it through my eyes only.

And a lot of times, it felt like things were so off or were having a big conflict and years ago, I was like, what’s happening? Why is this? Why is this feeling hard? And then I recognized, then I brought this mantra in for myself. It’s like, there’s plenty of time. I don’t have to solve everything right now. There really isn’t a sense of urgency. It’s so often just manufactured. And as soon as I say that to myself, okay, there’s plenty of time, I just feel my energy come down. I just feel so much calmer and then I’m really able to use the other tools that we talk about so often, just listening and validating and leaving space and all of those pieces.

And so, it comes into play in so many ways. So, it’s going to be fun to talk about it and see what it means to the two of you, but that’s really what it is for me. It’s about shedding that sense of urgency that I’ve been handed and can get caught up in, but especially bringing it into relationships and problem solving. Because everybody feels so much more comfortable and seen and calm. And what I’ve found is that when I can bring that calm to a situation, it just changes it.

ERIKA: Absolutely. Yeah. I love the phrase. I love using it. And one thing I really love about it is it applies to everything. Because it really is just about calming myself. And so, it doesn’t matter if I’m doing future tripping, scary things about, this is going to be terrible in five years or whatever, or if it’s just in this moment, we have to get to the meeting or we have to go to the restaurant, or whatever it is. So, it’s all those little day-to-day moments. And also it applies to, why aren’t they reading fluently yet? You know what I mean? How are they going to be able to do their laundry and stuff?

So, anytime those fears get in mind, there’s plenty of time, feels like taking a deep breath. It feels like giving myself space to get out of that tunnel vision and get out of that fear vision that I can get into just because of stress of life.

And so, I was thinking that part of why we have this urgency, or maybe it’s a symptom, but in school, right? So, you do a class and then the bell rings and you’d have another class, and then the bell rings and you have another class. And so, we get trained into this, onto the next thing, onto the next thing. Like we should always be moving forward with this quickness. And so, the plenty of time idea to me feels so good and healthy and it’s like giving a gift to my kids to give them space to not say, okay, onto the next thing. Onto the next. Like, that’s enough of that, let’s move on. There’s plenty of time. They can spend as much time as they need on what they want to do. And we don’t have to be in a rush and fall into that sense of urgency.

PAM: I love that you brought that school lens to it, too, because as you were talking there, it reminded me not just from class to class to class, but how much of our lives in school are timed. Tests are timed. Everything that you do is pointing towards, I need to do this quickly. The quicker I can fill out my test, the more of it I’ve done and the higher mark I get. Doing things quickly is held up as the goal, right? So, it is a surprisingly big shift to release that need, that urgency, to dig into why it feels urgent. Is it because I just want to do it fast so that I look like I did it successfully?

And then for me, another piece, or another layer as I pulled back that urgency thing, it was, I discovered more often than not, it was because I was feeling uncomfortable in the situation. So, there was discomfort and it was more about trying to make myself comfortable again in whatever the situation was. I wanted to solve it fast so that I looked good, but also I was uncomfortable with this nebulousness or this unsolved piece of our lives. And so, getting more comfortable with discomfort, not seeing discomfort as a bad thing, but seeing it as just like part of the process it, I came to see it was where I could get to that curious thing.

Now, if I just sat there and did nothing and just tried to pretend that it would go away, my discomfort was just extended. And then we just got more and more uncomfortable, because we weren’t really talking about it, and we weren’t really making any movement forward. I was going to say progress, but then that brings in judgment to it. But it’s that idea.

But it was so valuable to me to be able to take that step back, to be able to say, you know what? I can sit with this discomfort for a while. I can get curious, I can learn more things. Like you were saying, Anna, we learn so much when we actually start looking at the people involved and observing their reactions, actually hearing what they’re sharing. Actually processing enough for myself so I can share what I’m feeling or thinking in a way that isn’t judgmental about what other people are feeling, but just another thread through the situation.

Because the other valuable piece of that is then other people don’t feel so defensive, like they have to dig in and defend whatever their perspective is or whatever direction they are thinking they’d like it to unfold. And we can just release a lot of that tension so that we can have just more conversations around it.

But if we don’t think there’s plenty of time to have those conversations, we’re like, okay, like this is the best solution. This is our fastest way. You’ll like this. Trust me. And we hold onto that so tightly. Even if we don’t force people to do it, our energy comes with, this is the best solution. And in our conversations, we’re picking out the pieces that align with that. Oh yes, you said this, see that fits with this that I’m wanting to do. And what we’re trying to do is navigate everybody else to come to the conclusion that our path was the best versus actually working with each other. But that takes time, doesn’t it?

ANNA: Right. And I think it’s so helpful to just unpack that idea that faster is better and even an efficiency lens. Because I live with someone who has an efficiency lens about certain things and it’s really interesting to see the rub of that. It’s like, where’s it coming from? What is that idea that the straight path is better, it’s faster? Where does that come from? Because I think in a lot of situations, outside of ourselves, it’s serving someone else. In school, it’s serving just that we’ve got to keep moving and we’ve got to keep getting 30 kids turned out of this and getting them through the test.

And I was always that super fast test taker. I’m a super fast eater. I just really bought all into this fast is better and efficiency lens. And again, I think there are times when it serves me, but I really do think I missed a lot in those days. I think I didn’t retain that material, because I really was just quickly going through the test to spit it back out.

And what I loved about watching my kids when they were younger and as they grew up was just, it was a richer experience where they really took time with things and made mistakes. We talk about this where it’s like, “made mistakes” is kind of a school concept again, but for them, it was just like, ooh, try this and pivot here and do this.

And when you just really embody this sense that there’s plenty of time, there is no wrong way. And with each turn and with each choice that you make, you’re learning something about yourself, about the people that you’re with, even about the particular subject, do I like this? Do I not like this? Do I want to do it a different way? And I just feel like I short-circuited a lot of that learning for myself when I was younger. I feel like my kids gave me that back to just recognize, like, yeah, I just want to slow it down so that I can connect with the people so that I can learn more about myself.

I feel like that’s another piece of this is when we’re on that fast track, it can distract us a little bit from looking at ourselves and understanding our own pieces. And I’ve definitely been guilty of that. And so, I feel like as I’ve gotten older, and then as my kids kind of taught me this lesson, it was like, oh, okay. It goes back to what you’re saying, Pam, sitting with discomfort, because sometimes when we’re learning things about ourselves, it’s a little uncomfortable. But learning that, hey, I can sit with this and learn more about myself. And maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it’s like, now I feel like that’s why we’re here. That’s what this human journey is all about. And so, I love this little quick reminder. Because, like you said, Erika, it’s like taking a deep breath and whew, here we are.

ERIKA: Yeah. As you both were talking, I was thinking about life with little kids. I feel like this is where this first came to mind was life with little kids. Because imagine when you go for a walk with a little kid, you take one step out the door and they are looking at something and it just feels like it’s going to take forever, and why are we stopped here? That kind of thing. And so, I feel like, a lot of us have had that experience of like, oh my gosh, my toddler just wants to do this same thing for hours and hours, and how can we get through it?

And so, I think that was the beginning of, deep breath. There’s no rush. We don’t have to move on to the next thing. But once you can get in that head space of, there’s plenty of time and let’s just see how things unfold, I don’t need to direct, I don’t need to point out the right way to do something or the thing that I think is important or whatever, and just kind of letting things unfold for our kids. They can learn so much more. They can learn more about themselves, they can learn more about the things that they’re interested in.

And so, I think that sense of urgency or that checklist that we might have in our mind of the next thing. Well, they learned how to do this, so then the next thing is this, having that mental checklist and that sense of urgency really gets in the way of them creating their own learning journey.

And I think the same thing applies to us. And we had many years of really not knowing that there’s plenty of time and not having the space to learn about ourselves. And so, that deep breath and that time and settling our brains down to be like, it doesn’t have to be the next thing. Just focusing on what’s in this moment and relaxing into this moment, it’s just so powerful.

PAM: It’s so powerful. And I just love how you can take this little nugget and apply it everywhere. We talked about relationships. We’ve talked about challenges, talked about learning. It’s just so vastly valuable in all of those spaces to be able to peel back that layer. For me, that’s part of the transition to like lifelong learning from school, curriculum-based learning. There’s plenty of time for that thing to bubble up and there’s plenty of time for them to stay stuck with this one thing that they’re really focused on right now.

It just applies everywhere and it’s a valuable little thing just to bring to our days and really explore just that push that we feel. Because we can feel it in so many ways. And as I just think back over my days, it’s just like, okay, this and then this and then this. But truly there is so little that is an emergency. We can take the time to actually engage with it, to sit with it for a little bit. And as you both said, we just learn so much when we do that. I learned so much from watching my kids and I really had to go back to that beginning place and not just figure it out myself, because when I looked to them, I could see it in action. I could see them taking the time and I’m like, oh. Why aren’t they wanting to do this and this?

Sometimes I tried offering things, but I was also cognizant enough to, when I got some pushback or just like completely ignored, not to have expectations around things, especially when we bring them to our kids. Because they may be in a place where even though that could be really cool and interesting to them, right now they’re still here. There’s plenty of time for them to notice that thing.

So, for me, it’s just like, I can plant a seed and then maybe the next day or the next month or two years down the road, it’s like, hey, remember when you mentioned this thing? I’d like to hear more about that.

So, there’s plenty of time just works in just about any situation. You can use it just about every day in our society.

ANNA: It does! And I know sometimes, people will ask, what do I do? I’m frustrated or I’m not showing up in the way I want to. Or, we’re having these conflicts. And they just want to know, what’s going on? What are some options? And I think this piece is really a great place to start. Because I think anytime we’re under time pressure, and I think it’s probably worse for some personalities, mine being one of them, but time pressure builds this feeling like, I want to do a good job, I want to get there on time. All these other outside messages that I’ve had.

What I found is, again, I wasn’t showing up as the person I wanted to when I was bringing that sense of urgency under that time pressure. And so, I think it’s a great place to start to just go, okay, so we’re having an interaction, like you were saying, Erika, we’re trying to get out the door or something, and I feel myself like getting a little energy about it, and what if I just change it?

And that’s the kind of situation I would use it, in like, you know what? There’s actually plenty of time. And my energy would come down. The kids’ energy would come down. David’s energy would come down. And we’d get out the door. And so, I think it’s just when you find yourself feeling that feeling, especially if there’s a tightness to it, just see how it feels to breathe into, there’s actually plenty of time.

Because, like you said, Pam, the amount of times that it’s an actual emergency, you’re not even going to be thinking. You’re going to act. You’re going to pull that kid out of the road. You’re going to do the thing that you need to do. You’re going to take care of the wound. Whatever the thing is happening, that’s an actual emergency. There won’t be time to be getting irritated with people or thinking about what’s happening in your head. So, that’s the clue to me that, wait a minute, this is about me. And what happens if I bring that different energy?

ERIKA: I was thinking about the emergencies, too, and honestly it helps then, too. If you feel like you’re freaking out and there are too many things. It’s like, there’s plenty of time. It’s my reminder, too, it’s just one step at a time. So, I know I have these moments, not emergencies, but say I’m hungry and then they’re also hungry. And then also the phone rings. And the dog needs to go out. All these things could pile up in a split second where it felt like everything was fine and now everything is busy. And so, if in that moment when I start to feel myself getting overwhelmed, I could just be like, there’s plenty of time, one thing at a time, one step at a time, it just helps in every situation.

PAM: Yeah, it’s true. It really does. And I think it’s just such a great reminder that we have agency, because so often when things like that are piling up on us, we feel like all we can do is react. But I think the shift that there’s plenty of time helps me. It helps me ground. It helps me center. It helps me process a little bit so that I feel more like I’m responding. Because like you’re both saying, when we react, we bring so much negative energy to the situation. And then people start reacting to us, and then it’s just like this ping pong ball of stress that goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth till we’re all completely frustrated.

And somebody says, well then we’re not going. And too bad. But, oh my gosh, when I could remember to bring that energy of, there’s plenty of time, so that everybody’s energy is down, we would actually get out faster than if I was trying to prod everybody, like literally time-wise faster and feeling so much better, when I wasn’t constantly prodding people and prodding people and instead I was supporting, asking, do you need some help with this? Just not getting in people’s way, not constantly poking them. I think when I’m feeling an urgency, I’m poking people and then they’re just like, screw that. Or they’re poking back.

ANNA: Putting up a wall.
PAM: Exactly. The wall goes up and then we move slower.
ANNA: Right. I’m going to repeat something you said, Erika, just because I think it’s so important. I love this. We’re talking about how to use it in these moments, but it’s both, right? It’s using it in those intense moments, but it is also that there’s plenty of time to learn the things that they need to learn. There’s plenty of time for relationships and friendships to develop and grow later on. Because we can get stuck in our heads about, but do they have enough friends or are they doing enough this or this or that?

And so, that was another time I found it so valuable was just like, but actually this is a long game. If we’re lucky enough, we have a long life to figure all of these pieces out. And if it’s a short life, then even more I want to be just doing what we love and enjoying each other. So, it really helped calm me from both sides. And so, I love again that it’s useful in these moments and it’s also useful when we get in a spiral that’s a little more, out there, future worry, esoteric.

PAM: Yes. Me too. Well, thank you so much to everyone for joining us. We hope that you enjoyed our conversation and even picked up a nugget or two for your unschooling journey and, let’s face it, life and living, because this is just something fundamental, I think, to human beings, or at least to those of us who grew up in that more conventional school-based environment where the pressure came to do things fast and do things right, don’t make mistakes. All that stuff really plays into that fear and that urgency we feel. So, just reminding ourselves that we have plenty of time and playing with that throughout the day in all sorts of situations can really help us see some really fun layers where we can apply it and it can be useful.
And remember to check out The Living Joyfully Shop at, not surprisingly livingjoyfullyshop.com. And we wish everyone a lovely week. Thanks so much! Bye!