Just Gimme a (Mexican) Minute: Moving From Hustle to Flow

How the Mexican Minute has taught me to value presence over productivity.

Courtney Bowden

Oct 05, 2024

Transcript

It was mid-June here in Playa Del Carmen. The sun was in full blaze, sending relentless heat waves across everything in sight. I’m not exaggerating when I say it had to be 100 degrees inside my house. The air was thick—so heavy it felt like walking through soup. The ceiling fan above was spinning, but lazily, as if it too was giving up in the face of the heatwave.

All the air conditioning units but one had decided to check out the day before, and the walls of my home seemed hellbent on holding onto every bit of that sweltering heat, turning the kitchen and the common space into an oven.

Desperate, I messaged Juan, my go-to repairman. “Mañana,” he assured me. And I clung to that promise, imagining the cool, sweet relief that would be mine tomorrow.

But “mañana” came and went—no Juan.

By afternoon, I was drenched - the already paper-thin shirt sticking to my back. Then, my phone buzzed. It was Juan: “Mil disculpas. ¿Puedo pasar en la mañana?” He apologized and asked if he could stop by tomorrow morning.

Feeling the air growing thicker by the minute, I hurled expletives into it.

I thought: Mil disculpas?! En la mañana? Nah. I need you to come ahora. Now, bruh!

My attitude soured knowing that I’d have to wait at least another hundred-degree day for some relief.

How…American of me.

So I told Juan it was okay and he could come tomorrow.

Tomorrow came. Noon passed. By 3 o’clock, my house was a furnace again, and just as I was about to message Juan to see if he was still coming, I heard a knock. He had finally arrived, drenched in sweat.

“Buenas tardes. ¿Que tal?”

Seeing the look of relief on my face, Juan strolled in with a sheepish smile and got right to work.

He wasn’t flustered. He wasn’t hurried. In fact, his energy was so relaxed, it completely threw me off. I offered him a glass of ice water, although I didn’t know whether to laugh or be pissed.

That, my friend, was my first real encounter with what I would later come to know as the "Mexican Minute."

I mean, in all honesty, I’m not exactly the most punctual person, but this was on a whole other level.

At first, it grated on my nerves. I mean, come on—typically when you’re waiting on some type of at-home service or repair in the U.S., they at least give you a time window. “Between 8 a.m. and noon” or “noon to 4 p.m.,” right? And even then, we get impatient if they’re late. But here? There’s no such thing. The idea of an exact time seemed irrelevant.

It’s like time here flows on a completely different clock—one that, at first, I couldn’t quite grasp.

What I eventually realized, though, was that the Mexican Minute wasn’t just about whether someone was on time or late. It reflected something deeper—a whole way of living that I wasn’t used to yet. Here, life didn’t run on rigid, high-pressure timelines like I was used to back in the States. Instead, it made room for the unexpected, for things to just be.

Back in the U.S., everything moves fast—relentlessly. We’re like machines, with our productivity maximized and optimized, with every second squeezed for what it’s worth. We measure our value by how much we can accomplish in a single day, so when we don’t hit those marks, it feels like failure.

But in this part of Mexico? The flow is completely different. There’s patience here. Disculpas. Breathing room. There’s an understanding that not everything has to happen right now. There’s a kind of grace in the pace, a reminder that rushing isn’t the only way to live.

It took me a while to get used to it. At first, I was so frustrated because I took the times quoted to me literally, constantly checking what I was told against the clock. I’d been trained to believe that productivity was the ultimate goal, that success was measured in how much I could do, how quickly I could check things off my list.

But slowly, Mexico started teaching me that life can move differently. Here, there’s time. Time to rest. Time to connect. Time to just be.

That’s when the Mexican Minute shifted from being a frustration to a gift. What I initially saw as inefficiency started to feel like freedom. The freedom to let go of that need to always be on the go, to always be doing, striving or achieving. I found myself reclaiming my days in a way that felt unfamiliar but liberating. I no longer measured success by my output, but by how fully I could be present in the moments that mattered.

Many people would describe the pace here as slower.I would tend to agree. What I would also say is that here, the concept of time is calibrated to the pace of humanity instead of machines.

Adapting to that shift has helped me understand what it means to be alive and human in a way I hadn’t before.

The Mexican Minute may frustrate newcomers, but to me, it’s become a reminder that life doesn’t have to be a race.

Maybe, just maybe, we all need to give ourselves permission to not keep up with the relentless pace of productivity we’ve been conditioned to chase. What if we allowed ourselves to step outside the grind and embrace the unexpected pauses, the slower rhythms, the moments where life happens in spite of the hustle?

The truth is, this slower, more human pace has given me something far more valuable than ticking boxes on a to-do list. It’s given me my life back. I’m learning how to be present, how to move at my own rhythm, and how to live fully.

So now, when someone tells me mañana, I smile. I’ve surrendered to the fact that tomorrow will come when it comes, and there’s no rush. I can trust the process knowing that life will unfold in its own time. And that, I’ve come to understand, is the real freedom.

-Courtney