Time for Sale! Bottled Time for Sale!
Time.
Time is one of the single most valuable things in life, yet
humans insist on wasting it. We insist on procrastinating. We insist on putting
it off to another day, because we don’t feel like it (like we’ll ever feel like
it), and we convince ourselves we worked hard and need a break. Maybe we did.
Or maybe we trick ourselves into thinking we did more than we actually did. But
maybe you don’t need this post. Maybe you don’t procrastinate, like, ever. If
so, then go write a post about that and share your secrets with the world. But
for the rest of us who are mere mortals, here’s some thoughts I’ve been having
about why we need to treat the time we have as a precious gift.
So why is time precious? Well, simply put you can’t buy
more. You can’t find more. You don’t even know how much you have. You might
have everything planned out for the next five years and then someone comes
along and steals that time from you, and you have none left. You can’t even put
time on hold for a while because guess what, you’d still be using time.
So alright, time is precious because you don’t know how much
you have and you can’t get any more of it. But why should you care? Why should
anyone care that they have a time limit? Because they want to achieve
something. Because they have dreams, and they want to leave their mark on the
world before they go. Or because they simply want to have a fulfilling life.
You don’t have to go after fame and fortune, but that doesn’t mean you can
waste time. It just means you have different goals in life. Like maybe you want
to climb a mountain instead of writing a best seller. That’s fine. But time is
still valuable.
Now that we’ve established time is precious, what does this
mean? It means you stop procrastinating (or try to, it is a hard habit to
break). It means you make time each day for whatever your goal is, and that
becomes what’s important in your life. For me, it’s writing. I’ve always (well
since 15) wanted to be a writer. But it took me a ridiculously long time to
write my first novel. Granted I only worked on it in the summers and not during
the school year, but I started when I was 15 and didn’t send it off until 22.
If I had worked at it, it could have been finished long before that. But it
wasn’t important enough in my life, or I procrastinated working on it. I’ve
been procrastinating things for so long that I almost don’t know how to live
without it. But you know what else it did? It made me miserable, and I bet it
makes you miserable too. When we procrastinate we just do mindless things, or
stuff that isn’t really important or anything to just avoid thinking about what
it is we know we should be doing. Where if we just did the thing, we’d probably
be happier.
But the thing you want also has to be important to you. Like
I mentioned earlier, my writing may not have been important enough in my life
when I was younger. I still wanted to do it, but I also wanted to do other
things more, as I didn’t see the big picture. But you have to decide for
yourself what’s important in your life. Then you need to make time for it each
day. Or at least most days of the week. If it’s not important and you just do
it because someone else told you to, chances are you’ll have a lot harder time
getting motivation to complete the goal. And life’s too short to work for
something you don’t want.
I hope this has helped you see time for the value that it
has. It’s the one thing that everyone has but can’t really own. Spend your time
wisely, and consider that when you choose to do one thing, you’re choosing not
to do another.
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