How would you spend an extra few minutes in your day?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the #1 question to ask yourself before making a purchase. The question was actually not related to money, but about how will your time be affected with that purchase. I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the concept of time. For the past few days as part of my March project, I’ve been waking up to take a picture of the sunrise. It’s instilled in me that no matter what, the day always ends and begins. I don’t control when the sun rises. I just know that it does everyday even if clouds cover it up. I also know that even if I don’t see the sun, another day has begun. Time continues on whether I am mindful of it or not.
I think the problem is that we think we can make time. We can always do things tomorrow. We can always wait. We think we can add sand to the hourglass. The reality is that this is not the case. Yesterday has passed. This morning is over. I can’t add another minute or another hour to my day. It’s finite. There’s no such thing as making time. Making time carries with it the act of creating something, but time already exists. It can’t be manipulated and extended. Wherever you are in the world, whatever you are doing, we all have the same exact 24 hours in a day. No extra second or extra minute. So how do we ensure we spend our time in a way that is valuable? We can’t make more time and we can't take back time.
If today, your kids ask you to play with you and you say “I don’t have time. How about tomorrow?”, you’ve lost that time already. It can’t be taken back. It can’t be made up. It’s not just your time that you’ve lost, but also theirs.
I wonder if we would live our lives differently if we start counting down. What if at our birth, someone told us, we have exactly 70 years to live, 45 years, 20 years? If you knew you would live to be 100 years old, but your child only has 20 years, how do you live in a way that allows you to maximize the amount of time you have together? How would that change the way we approach life? How would we use our time? How would we spend other people’s time? What would we do more of? Would material things matter as much?
We don’t make time, we have time. We own our time. The challenge is that we don’t know how much of it we own. We also don’t know how much someone else has so we live blindly thinking we have more than enough.
We don’t construct time so if we don’t have a say in how time is brought about, what do we have a say in? Only how we use our time.
Here's a PSA sponsored by Cladwell about taking the time. What do you wish to do more of and what's stopping you?
"We believe that on our death bed--if we are so blessed to get there--our wish will not be that we did things faster. We will wish we slowed things down. We will wish that we took the time to enjoy all the moments. We will wish that we carpe-d the hell out of the diems we had.
