On Time

Hello! Did you miss me last Sunday? I took the week off, but it wasn’t intentional. Actually, I didn’t realize the week had even come and gone, until a friend of mine pointed out that I had not posted anything. It wasn’t until then that I realized time had simply gotten away from me. That realization made me wonder: what did I do with my time? Did I make any progress? Were any of my goals met? Was either my comfort or joy enhanced? Or was I just like a circus performer, spending time trying to keep multiple plates spinning on different sticks at one time, with no real objective other than to say, “Look at me! See how much I can do at once?”

In this life when options seem countless and priorities are in constant competition, how do you decide how to spend your time? Is it more important during a given hour to serve your spirit, taking time for meditation and prayer, or more important to serve your relationships, meeting a friend for coffee? Or should you work on your career, putting in one more hour at the office? Maybe you should focus on your health and make a stop at the gym… And once you decide, for example, to spend an hour focusing on your finances, how do you decide what is most important within that subset of potential demands? Will you be working on your tax return? Paying bills? Reviewing your investments? Writing a budget?

I wonder if this is why, because it’s so difficult to determine which of the things competing for our attention actually deserve our time, we resort to living from deadline to deadline. I think that, more often than me choosing how to spend my time, Time, that is to say, the days circled in red on my calendar, determine for me what I will be doing next. It is an absolutely crazy-making way to live.

Today I’m going to use my time, just a bit of it, to revisit my own life plan. I need to make certain that the things I am doing with my time are things that actually allow me to experience this life in the ways I choose. Sure, some of my time has to be spent in foundation building and completing basic chores, but if I don’t recognize which of those things are part of my own life vision, and start saying, “No, thank you,” to the things that don’t enhance that, time is just going to fly past me. I’m going to stop just cramming more into the day, and start recognizing which part of my best-life-plan is being served by the time I’m spending.

So, what about the time I’m spending writing this blog? Well, as it turns out, it’s a very economical usage of minutes. I get to commune with my friends (especially if you’d like to share your thoughts with me in return), spend a moment with my spirit as I re-evaluate my own struggles and passions, and practice my favored career choice of being a writer. That’s a lot of my own life vision being lived in one little activity. So, how about you? How would you like to spend your time, today? This week? This year? This fabulous lifetime?