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Time

‘Lost time can never be found again.’

        - Benjamin Franklin

Life is defined by having a limited amount of time. Death is a part of life, things that cannot die aren’t considered to be alive, one cannot exist without the other. No-one knows how much time they really have, and even if you did, I'm still sure we wouldn't use it much differently. ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow, but learn as if you were to live forever.’

       - Mahatma Ghandi

There will be a lot of quotes in this post, drawing from those with much more wisdom than I will hopefully make what I'm trying to get across much clearer. Time isn’t our most valuable asset, it’s our only asset. We trade our time for money, to enrich the rest of our time, or keep us alive to have more time. We alone are responsible for how we spend our time, our lives. The decisions we make decide what wealth we have in this life, and I don’t mean monetarily, although that can be a form of wealth. 

‘We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.’

Time can be spent or lost, there isn’t any other way to use it, you can’t reserve it, or hold onto it for a rainy day. To give our time to things that gives life value is the best possible way to use it, be it our life, or the life of another. That can be work, it can be recreation, it could just be spending time with someone, showing love and being open.

‘Life isn’t about what you fill it with, but rather who you spend it with.’

I think there is a difference between spending time with someone, and killing time with someone, the former brings value, the latter is just a less lonely way to lose time. This leads me into a hard place, I have relationships with people where I currently am, but I find them shallow, we don’t discuss the deeper things, we don’t love each other deeply, and although I might push for the former, I find myself constantly falling into the latter.

‘A mans wealth can be seen in the good he does in this world.’

       - Khalil Gibran

I constantly feel like I'm not doing enough in my spare time, almost to the point of anxiety about sitting around. Truth is that there is a cost to spending your time, and it’s hard to put into words. As if spending your time doing something selfless both enriches your life and yet limits it too. As if helping another is like giving them your time, however if you expect something in return it loses its value, but at the same time, if you receive nothing back, was it really a good use of your time? Even if it’s not spending your time with others, learning by yourself can be good, or a waste of time, because you never know what you’ll learn.

‘He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.’

       - Jim Elliot

One thing about all this that gives me peace, is that if I spend my time trying to do something, and it fails, I've only lost time, my time can’t have a negative value if I'm trying to do something positive with it. I would happily trade my time to enrich another life.

‘No-one is useless who lightens the burden of another.’

       - Charles Dickens

Use your time, however you can, you won’t regret doing something, even it doesn't pan out, opposed to doing nothing. I’m writing this as much to myself as I am to others, hopefully it has some impact.

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Fear

Fear is learnt, we’re born with only two fears, a fear of loud noises, and a fear of falling. Some fears are learnt through negative experiences, like a fear of extreme heat through burning yourself or a fear of ants through getting bitten. But there are some fears that are taught to us by others, like a fear of failure or a fear of cockroaches. Then there are fears that we enlarge, so although we should have some degree of fear about them we often fear them too much, like a fear of spiders or the dark. This leads me to question what fears I have learnt from others, and what fears I have taught. It makes me question whether my fears are reasonable or not, ‘True courage isn’t the absence of fear, but rather the ability to overcome it’. Fear is a mix of both thought and emotion, and so I need to address it as such, I can’t let unreasonable fears hold me back from doing something great, but I mustn’t cast them away all together, if I am even capable of doing so. I mustn’t fear what I cannot change, or things that may comes to pass, I shouldn’t fear what I cannot see, or don’t understand. I should challenge my fear, but not deny it completely. Fear can be good and prevent harm, but it can prevent good and cause harm too, if left to grow on its own, fear can overcome a person. ‘If you don’t leave your comfort zone, it gets smaller.’ But I would add, if you don’t challenge your fears, they grow larger.

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Choices

I’ve recently realised that there is too much to do in life. Even if you were to spend every waking moment doing something you wouldn’t be able to do them all, or see all there is to see or spend time with all the people you could associate with. I like to finish things, but life is too big to finish. We have to make choices in life, and they’re hard choices, big and small, and they change the course of our life. We are the people we choose to be.

This realisation both gives me a sense of empowerment, and makes me feel lost. Currently residing in a different country living the simple life, when I go back home I will have to choose what I want to do with my life. I have to choose what jobs I wish to work in order to pay my debts and finish projects that i’ve run away from. I have to choose which relationships to invest time into and restore and which to leave at a basic level. I have to choose which church to be a part of and what level of involvement I want to have. I have to choose whether to stay in my hometown or move. I have to choose a life, with no idea of the real outcome.

I’ve wasted so much of my time already, mainly with work, making things that shouldn’t have been work into work and doing work instead of more meaningful things. But also with people, people who haven’t had a positive influence on my life in any way, and although I'm not in a relationship to gain, but rather to give, I wonder if I gave them anything worthy of the time I spent with them, if investing my time in some people has had any impact or if it was a waste on both sides.

I realise that time is finite, that I only have so much of it and that what I do with it, who I spend it with, and how well I manage it directly dictates my quality of life, and defines my life as a whole. Yet I keep deciding to do nothing, to avoid the choice and live with the vastly more disappointing consequence of that decision. 

‘I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday’                          -Eleanor Roosevelt

So if I decide not to choose, I become whatever the world may make of me, becoming a product of my environment, rather than the individual that I should be, affecting change in the world around me and lifting up others to see them grow and make hard choices of their own. If I fail to make choices, I fail at life itself.