the irreplaceable

the power of time

In life, we often pursue bright, shiny items which we then discard soon after we gain them, much as children do a desired toy. We get bored with the item, or we learn it wasn’t as special as we thought, or something new stimulates our insatiable interest. That is not the end of the world but it blinds us to the uniqueness of time.

Time is truly irreplaceable. Period. A moment appears for us only once, then the next, and there is absolutely truly nothing we can do to recoup those split seconds (I am skeptical about that time travel from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time).

The greatest single gift I believe I can give is my time, pure and simple. Not at all because my time is anymore valuable than anyone else’s; it is not. I am just me, which is pretty average. (And I don’t always do as good a job on what I am discussing here so it’s a work in progress for me, too.)

It is the gifting of time that is so special because we seem to have countless options on where to bestow our precisous time as we do with where we put any other resources. We tend to put our time where we prioritise our values but we may not like what we see when we audit that relationship. (Sometimes valuing peace within a family is more important for the long run over the chance to see a hockey game so we pass the ticekts to someone else.)

We do indeed have the opportunity frequently to choose how we use our time. (If you tell me that you don’t value your job as much as the time you must spend there, I answer that you certainly value the income the company or service or whomever associates with your time in paying you a salary in exchange for your time. I’ll never forget the first time I really made that connection after hearing ‘Marketplace’, the public radio broadcast, over several weekends. Some things do take me a while to grasp….) We often can change our behaviours but don’t realise it because it seems hard to scary but those too are choices.

Once spent we cannot get the time back. One will often hear the joke ‘I did ____ this morning. 45 minutes of my life I cannot get back.’

No, you cannot get that time back. You have spent the time as one spends one’s savings yet we don’t have the chance to add back to the account. None of us will ever have those individual moments again, ever. And we often won’t have the opportunities for how to spend our time, either.

As we age, we often realise we have spent time on a lot of drama that we wish we had not (check mark here). We also often appreciate we have more friends with whom we want to revisit experiences yet opportunities to see them are narrowing with the passing of time. Ultimately, we too often rue the choices we made to do one thing over letting know people know how much they matter to us. Science keeps telling us that experiences matter more than stuff but I am not sure we believe it yet.

We cannot control time, either. We often complain that time controls us but the truth is more of a dynamic which we ignore too often only to awaken eventually unable to speak with or share a crappy fast food meal with a relative or chum so important to our lives in some way.

We had lunch today with friends important to my husband over the past forty years. We don’t see them as often as we would like but we make a conscious decision to dedicate time to seeing them when their and our schedules and locations coincide. We know that we have far fewer chances ahead. We so value these folks’ smiles and memories. We both felt fabulous after they dropped us off because we had made the commitment above others to see them.

This means we did not do something else today. Life is a series of trade offs or, as the economists say in their fancy terminology, ‘opportunity costs’. Lots of days we don’t want to admit we can’t either be in two places at the same time or, worse, have everything we want but that is not how life works; it just isn’t.

As we sat over coffee this morning, I asked my husband who has a big birthday this year (all birthdays are important so this one is a defined as a big one!) what he has not had the chance to do in his life yet. I said I wanted to know what was on that list so we can schedule those things to assure we commit time for them.

He responded that he doesn’t have anything that he hasn’t either done or currently has scheduled. Amazing, I thought, but a mark of a person who appreciates his life and choosing how he spends his time. He is living a good life and spending it well.

Go see friends you know you want to see now; shift something else lower down your time priorities than the friendship, if at all possible. I realise that is not always possible financially for everyone to go somewhere or ignore work but at least call or email these people to signify to them how much they matter to you, even briefly. It will make their day and make yours. You may not have the chance again. FIN