2023 is halfway through. Everything you looked forward to seemed to slip through your finger—lost in a pile of never-ending to-dos. Time management has seeped itself deep into your brain. You know (or at least you think) you can do better. Be better, waste less time scrolling through your phone, and wake up earlier.
Somehow, someone somewhere is getting ten times more done than you, maybe wakes up later and feels less tired. In some perverted way, filling up your day with To-dos pulls you down an illusion of productivity and time management but leaves you lost and further from a goal.
Instead, timetables and reminders seem to lead you into debilitating procrastination.
Before we all know it, the year is over.
The Illusion of Time
Einstein breaks our traditional understating of time (Read more about it in this article by Interesting Engineering). Although we stand with a point of reference on the earth, we uphold an arbitrary rule that society has imposed on us to understand the past and the future.
At a young age, we learn the importance of time—waking up at the break of dawn to catch a ride or be early enough to make it to class at 7:30 am. We learn to be ashamed of being late and to veer as far away as possible from the walk of shame as we enter a class that has already started.
“Punctuality is the thief of time.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
With that, people run around chasing timelines that do not matter in the grand scope of things.
It is difficult to see people hit lifetime achievements while others convince themselves to get up in the morning. How does one reconcile living in the same time of extreme poverty and ultimate wealth protected by the top 1% of the top 10%?
Living in and breathing the same air as someone who has never set foot on public transportation feels like a joke. As long as we operate based on how time ingrained itself into our brains, there will always be people ahead and people behind.
The Freedom and Subjection of Choice
Living in the internet age, the age of literature and the overflow of information, there are millions of choices available for us that those 50 years ago could only imagine,
We have so much color, diversity, and options ready for us today. We run our hands through all the possibilities a day can offer like a window shopper admiring the display. We run around as if we have the freedom to choose them all.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”
. J. R. R. Tolkien
The longer we look, the plethora turns barren.
Your social status, job, responsibilities, and opportunities make the vast pool of choices feel like a puddle. Do we really have a say in how we spend our time and live the rest of our lives?
What happened to the vast ocean whose waves freely crashed upon the shore, no holds barred? What happened to the rhythm leading to a water of infinite depth and a sea of unreachable width?
All choices have consequences. Past decisions may have halved that ocean into a lake, while others divided that lake a hundred times over into a kiddie pool. Just as time is relative to where you are in this vast universe, so are the choices on your lap. Where you are in this human existence, surrounded by bureaucracy and human greed, do you and I really have a say?
The War between Choice and Time
If you were to turn back time, would you chase the bus to head to class? Would you sacrifice sleep to make it to work on time?
Given a choice, we would throw time’s demands out the window.
Without any second thoughts, we will choose to still time to catch up on our well-deserved sleep, that book you put down a month ago, and maybe just sit in the silence and stillness of the nothing that time is forever running away with.
But you can’t.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.
So here we are today.
A little older but not wiser, a little more tired but far from success, a little lost but not ready to be found. If time and choice were on our side, we would be a little more of the latter than the former.
There is no time machine to take us back, to save us from our dumb mistakes, to help us get ahead in the future. If choice and time were on our side, then we could have had the opportunity. But we cannot change the past and alter what the future has in store. The time we wasted brought us to where we are today and just might be pointing us to what matters.
The Presence in the Present
All we have is today.
I just learned that 8 hours of work a day or a 40-hour work week more or less result in 80 full days in a year. And yet I feel like I spend all my time working and have no choice about it. In reality, I have 285 days left in a year.
So what are you doing with the remaining 285 days in the year?
Time and choice may not be on our side, and work and deadlines may be pulling us in a hundred different directions, but we still have 285 days (maybe half of that if we consider sleep).
143 days of time and choices around. Why not try to make it count?
Busyzi 