Quest for You Episode 263 – Cultivating time
- You may not know it but I am obsessed with the concept of time
- I mean it – obsessed
- I covered a few episodes on time, but that doesn’t mean I am done and good with it
- Time is on my mind every day
- The lack of time for everything I still want to do
- The lost time that I wasted on everything I now would never do
- And the time I am losing every single day not making progress on the things I have started
- Time is my most valuable resource
- More than money even
- In my younger years my decisions were drive by money
- This was the question that decided many things I did or didn’t do
- Today I can replace the word money with time
- When is it?
- How long is it?
- This doesn’t mean I have endless amounts of money
- It just means that most of the things I value are affordable to me but they all don’t fit into the 24hrs of my day
- I constantly worry how to make things work out timewise
- Between my responsibilities and my personal goals there is often a trade-off
- Things I have to do and things I want to do
- Not doing what I have to do means slacking off –
- at work when I don’t get my stuff done or don’t perform at my best
- Or at home when my place is messy because I am out climbing every weekend instead of cleaning
- Not doing what I want to do frustrates me
- I feel I am not getting closer to the person I want to be
- I feel stuck
- I guess the time problem is a better problem to have than the money problem
- But it still makes me just as anxious
- There is so much I want to do
- And there is so much I have to do
- Where do I find a balance?
- I feel time constantly slips away
- And I look after it like someone who missed the train or the bus
- Always losing out
- Always late
- Always behind
- Then I came across a quote that made me pause for a little
- Its by Arnold Bennett
“The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”
― Arnold Bennett
- If I choose
- But I rarely choose
- I am good at stressing our over not having enough time
- But I am not so good at choosing deliberately what to do with my time
- I love this quote because its changes my perspective from a retroactive one to a forward looking one
- Instead of lamenting the past, how old we already are, how many years we wasted on that job, that relationship, in that place, we have a different option
- We can look forward to tomorrow and choose anew
- What is past is past
- But tomorrow is still fresh and not yet wasted
- We can actually decide today over tomorrow and how to make the most out of it
- We can cultivate time
- I think we are often to caught up over-analyzing the past
- Why things didn’t work out
- Why we didn’t make the right decision earlier
- Why didn’t I see this?
- In favor of looking back, we miss the opportunities that lie in looking forward
- We regret
- We lament
- We feel bad
- We blame and we judge
- But we often forget that tomorrow is a blank slate
-
- Maybe looking back is easier than confronting the now
- The past doesn’t require any decisions
- Its just like watching a movie – passive entertainment
- Its comfortable
- Looking forward and making a new call about tomorrow requires effort, maybe to much effort
- Or maybe we are to sure about tomorrow
- We know there will always be another day
- Why rush things
-
- We are comfortable with where things are now, even if they are not where we want them to be
- We procrastinate
- We wait it out
- Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, lets just see
- Cultivating time requires a more deliberate approach to time
- Placing more emphasis on our use of time
- And maybe changing our perspective on time a little
-
- Maybe valuing time is not my stressful approach to never having enough
- Maybe it’s a combination of the 2 quotes I shared
- Recognizing that tomorrow is not yet wasted
- And filled with opportunity to do what we really want to do
- To correct the mistake we made
- To put effort into an area previously neglected
- To work towards that goal we have been putting off to long
- Or to simply hit pause and take a break, a rest
- And then making a deliberate decision to make the time for it
- Not to favor money
- Or our routine
- Or what we have to do
- But to recognize time as the most valuable resource and to treat is as such
- I realize this is not always possible
- I also know I cannot just call into work 3 days in a row because I want to go climbing in Tahoe or visit my friend in Mexico City
- Cultivating time doest mean slacking off
- It means to carefully review our allocation of time
- And consider time a part of our wealth
- Not just money, which is necessary
- But there is more to a fulfilling life and a lot of those other things require time
- according to Bennett, we can turn over a new leaf every moment of every day,
- and how we spent yesterday, last week, or all the years we’ve been alive does not determine how we will spend the next hour
- that depends only what our next decision will be
- so – Let us turn over a new leaf, and begin to create the relationships, the adventures, and ultimately the life we want to have
much love
So, if time will pass and things will change, do we have the ability to influence time and change? Well,.
This viewpoint gives me much hope in our troubled times. We can change ourselves and our world by envisioning the next hour, the next day, the next week, the next month as something very new. This moment IS new, and it will never come again. As Dan Millman says, “There are no ordinary moments.”
As 2017 dawns, we find ourselves in a rapidly changing world. Time will pass – this day, this week, this month, this year. And so I am reminded once again that change will come as time passes.
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