Aging Capriciously

Stop wasting my time! This is a comment that is frequently heard and seldom reflected on. What does it mean to waste someone’s time? Does the person know they are wasting your time? What was the person doing that “wasted” your time? Is it like wasting food or wasting money? When someone tells you something that you are not interested in, does it waste your time? In a country where the average person watches more than 25 hours a week of TV, it seems preposterous that anyone could dare use a phrase like “stop wasting my time.”

We spend four hours per week watching people hitting a ball, carrying a ball, throwing a ball and bouncing a ball in games that we call sports, but we do not consider this a “waste” of our time. If sports and TV are not time wasters, then what qualifies? What wastes your time? Is this time when you are not doing anything? Whose fault is that if you have nothing to do? If we were honest, we would admit that most of us waste our own time with silly meaningless activities designed to take our mind off living and perhaps really accomplishing something. We are each experts at ways to waste time. TV, gambling, casinos, watching sports, newspapers, endless meetings, etc. are only a smattering of the myriad ways we waste our time each day.

Wasting time may be a very subjective term, since what I think is very wasteful, you might think is very useful. My ideas of what constitute a valuable use of time might fit your definition of “time wasters.” Nevertheless, we all have our own ideas of what time wasting means to us.

What if more of us started “wasting” our time on the activities that could really make a difference to the world? What would the world be like, if more of us took an interest in government, law and politics and less in TV, gambling, sports and other such time wasters? What if we spent more time in charitable activities, loving others, finding ways to bring peace to the world, building bridges and creating friendships with those in need? What if we spent 25 hours a week on creative activities instead of watching TV? Could you spend one hour less on TV this week and one hour more on peace? Where would you start? When will you start? Why not today?

You have one year to live! What if your doctor told you today that you had only one year to live? It’s not a pleasant thing to think about, but it might be true right now. Who among us can know the day of our death? We all know people who were healthy and active and died unexpectedly. We also know people who smoked, drank and never exercised and died rather less expectedly. Nevertheless, none of us know the exact day we will die. My sister was a smoker and like my father she was diagnosed with cancer. They predicted she would die within six months and she lived nearly four years longer. Neither my father nor sister had a very active or healthy life. Neither of them lived to their expected old age. My father was sixty when he died and my sister was fifty four. They both had ample warning to get their lives in order but both did little or nothing about it.

Perhaps too many of us live with no thought of dying because we “assume” we have a great deal more time to live. Maybe we are young and think we will live forever or maybe we regularly work out and think this will prolong our life. By assuming we will live longer, we put up with a lot of stuff that we would be better off dealing with. We stay in dead end jobs, we ignore things we really want to do, or we put off living until we are retired.

Are you waiting to live your life? If you died today, would you have any regrets? If you thought about the possibility that this proposition was true (that you only had one year to live), would you do anything different? Do you think you would try to get your life in better order? What do you need to do to make this next year the best year of your life?

Losing track of time! You thought it was 4 PM and it was now 7PM! Where did the time go? We have all had the experience of losing track of time. What causes us to lost track of time? I think for many of us, when we are so focused on what we are doing, time seems to simply fly by. It goes a hundred miles an hour when we are focused and disciplined. Time flies and we do not even notice. The minutes or even hours that we lost seem to have been compressed into a few seconds. Paradoxically, those times lost are some of the most memorable times in our lives.

The first time we met someone we fell in love with, our first day on a new job, a trip to a special place, a meeting with someone extraordinarily interesting; in each of these instances, time either flew by or we did not even notice the clock passing. We became so engaged that time no longer existed. And who can forget those times? The fact that we lost track of time is unimportant. What remains important to us is the experience of being so absorbed and so immersed in what we were doing or who we were with that time no longer mattered to us. We lose track of time because we stop caring about time and its passage. The present becomes more important than the past or the future. We are truly living in the present in these moments and time no longer counts.

When was the last time you lost track of time? What were you doing? How often do you lose track of time? Do you ever regret losing track of time? What if you lost track of time more often? What would your life be like if you were more absorbed in the present and less conscious of the past and future?

Losing time is an expression that one hears as “I lost a great deal of time waiting for him to show up.” In actual practice, this concept of losing time may either be an oxymoron or perhaps simply an outright impossibility. I suppose that you could argue that since we “find time”, perhaps someone has lost it somewhere. However, can you actually lose time? Have you ever lost time? I would like to know how one could lose something that exists only in our heads.

You might have used more time than you thought you would, but you never lost time. Even if you waited four hours for someone to show up whom never did, you did not lose time. You might not have got much done and you might have better used your time elsewhere but you did not lose anything; unless, it was faith in the person you were waiting for. Perhaps we are really talking about “misusing time, but that would be different than losing time.

If you misuse your body by smoking, excessive indulgences, lack of exercise, lack of sleep or too much stress, you will undoubtedly “lose” time, in the sense that you will live a much shorter life. Nevertheless, there are always those lucky few who will still outlive many of us regardless of how well we use our time. But for most of us, if we abuse our health and our time we can count on a shorter life. Thus, losing time is not like a watch that runs slower, it is more like taking time out of your bucket of time and throwing it away. The problem is you might never find it again. Once it is gone, it is gone forever.

Using your time properly, you will never lose it and it is never too late to start. Make a commitment to start exercising today or to stop smoking or to practice a better diet and you are making a commitment to finding time. These practices will help you to find the time that you lost by using your time properly. The correct use of time is the only way to really find time and the incorrect use of time is the only way to lose time. Use time to do the things that really add years to your life and you will be happier and live longer. What do you need to do today to start finding your “lost” time?

“Find More You Time!” This was a heading from a recent magazine cover. The byline was: “ten tips to try today.” Would you like to know what they are? First, let’s talk about the subject of this article. How often do you see tips for saving time? Seems just about every day another article or expert is telling you how to “save” time? Do you know anyone who has time in a bank someplace? “Yesterday I saved forty minutes and added it to my bank.” I now have six hundred hours in my bank to use or to extend my life-time with. Wow, now that would really be something! Imagine if we could add our “saved” time on to the end of our life. To date, I have not heard of any time savings plan that would allow us to do that. Mores the pity!

Whenever I “save” time, I usually end up just relaxing. I suppose I could apply it to my next task and have more time to do it in, but it never seems to work that way. I mean, if you save time traveling someplace, what does that really get you? More time to do the next job or maybe a little more piece of mind. Savings time seems to be akin to those ubiquitous diet plans that are always going to save you calories and thus help you lose weight. Do you see all of the people that have lost weight?

Maybe we are trying to do the wrong thing. Maybe saving time is not the right way to look at time. If we cannot really save time, then why describe it that way? What most of these ideas are about is really doing things faster or more efficiently. However, isn’t that what puts us on the treadmill in the first place? Always trying to do things faster and more efficiently; how many of us have become multi-taskers and to what benefit? Does multi-tasking really make us more productive or does it just cause us more stress. Maybe we need to learn how to waste time more. Maybe we need to play more and have more fun?

Are you always trying to save time? Have you managed to store time up for a rainy day? Are you always multi-tasking? Are you stressed out about not having enough time? Is your concern for saving time making you happier or more productive? What if you took more time for fun and play in your life? The hell with saving time!

Staying fit by the clock. Can time affect our diets? Some experts proclaim that there is a best time for everything. They say this applies to eating, sleeping, drinking and exercising. By following the best times, they report that you can stay healthier and happier. Staying fit by the clock is a philosophy that stresses consistency. You exercise and eat at consistent times during the day. However, with the many changes that each of use faces in our lives, we must fit our exercise and eating into the varied patterns that our daily schedule will face. Modern life does not allow many of us the luxury of a fixed schedule that never changes.

For instance, in terms of my own exercise schedule, I find that it must be flexible to accommodate my teaching schedule. My teaching schedule changes from quarter to quarter. Thus some quarters, I am teaching nights and others days. I adapt my exercise schedule to these changes. Some months, I exercise in the morning, some in the afternoon and some in the evening. There might be better times to exercise, but some exercise is better than no exercise regardless of when I do it. I have even run as late as 11 PM when it was dark and quiet.

I also like to pay attention to my body clock as well as my time clock. I don’t care if it is “eating” time or supper time. If I am not hungry, I am not going to eat. Eating by the clock seems foolish to me. We have so many experts giving us advice that we forget to listen to our own common sense. What does your body tell you? Do you feel good? Do you feel healthy? Are you proud of your looks and your health? If not, then you probably need to do something different. Explore, read, and ask an expert but DO NOT put all of your health and happiness into an expert’s hands, no matter how many degrees they have.

How can you take charge of your life and your time now? What is keeping you from taking responsibility for your own life? If you already feel that you do, wonderful.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. This is another popular old saying having to do with the virtues of getting up early. I must confess I have tried to adhere to this one as well in my life. Perhaps, it just suits my lifestyle but somehow I can always hear it in my mind as I rise out of bed. I love to get up as early. The world is my oyster and it is just waiting for me to open it. The sooner I get up the faster I can open my oyster.

In terms of accruing benefits (health, wealth and wisdom), I would say my life has been blessed by at least one of these benefits. I have been very healthy (to date). Has this benefit accrued because of my tendency to rise early and go to bed early? I seriously doubt it. More likely it has to do with my exercise routine and watching my weight.

This saying is generally attributed to one of the founders of this country and perhaps its wisest person ever, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. It is quoted almost verbatim in his Poor Richards Almanac, thus helping to make it a very popular aphorism. However, recent research shows that the saying can be found quoted in the Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina or Proverbs English, and Latine (1639) almost one hundred years before Franklin used it.

Thus it seems obvious that old sayings have a way of being around and recycled. Perhaps, we need to rephrase it for the 21st century. A new version might go as follows: “Early to bed is quite impossible and early to rise is a silly waste of a good bed.” I know my spouse would agree with that. Can you think of a better way to rephrase this old saying?

When I was young, I learned the saying “the early bird catches the worm.” Somehow, I really internalized this phase and it has become a sort of mantra for me. I can hear myself saying this a million times over in my life. Perhaps this ingrained bit of advice has become the defining way I live my life. I am forever up early; early to appointments, early to airports, early to parties, early to events. It does not really matter what the meeting is, I will be early for it.

Reflecting on it a bit, what does this little advice about catching worms really mean? I have seldom, if ever, caught a worm and when I did, it was in the evening. I remember shining my flashlight at night on the lawn and finding all sorts of worms. I don’t ever recall seeing any worms in the morning. You might say, well it is evident that getting up early helps you get the day going sooner, you have more time to spend and you will be more successful. At least, that is what I think it was supposed to mean. I have done this all my life, always gotten up early, been early to all my appointments and I am still waiting for my worm. Maybe, if we knew what worm we were supposed to be looking for, it would be easier. However, I am still not sure what kind of worm I want or even if I really want to catch a worm. Judging by the amount of late people out there, it would appear that many other people are not interested in catching worms.

Is there any validity to this bit of wisdom? Will you really be more successful, if you are an early bird? Do you think the “early birds” are catching more worms in life than the latecomers? Have you caught all the worms you want yet? Did you find “getting up early” was your key to success? Do you think you would be more successful, if you were more of an early bird? What works for you in your life, sleeping late or getting up early? Does it really make a difference?

Thursday is the day we are on the downward side of the week. In some countries, Thursday is the fourth day of the week and in others, it is the fifth day of the week. It was first named after the Roman god Jupiter. In English, Thursday became “Thor’s Day”, since the Roman god Jupiter was identified with Thor in northern Europe. Thor was the Norse God of Thunder. The Scandinavians believed that as his chariot crossed the sky, Thor wielded a hammer that shot lightening through the clouds.

When we think of Thursday now, we probably don’t think of Gods and Thunder any more. We are probably thinking “Tomorrow is Friday, one more day to go this week.” Even though many of us love our work and miss it when we are on vacation too long, the freedom of the weekend and what Saturday and Sunday represent beckons us the entire week. We mark the days until the weekend. Each week becomes a journey we take and on the way, we pass through Thursday. It is not the most remarkable day in the week nor is it the hardest day in the week. Its primary significance seems to be that by the time Thursday comes around; we know that tomorrow (Friday) will be the END of the week.

Of course, if you work weekends this will not be true. If you do not work a standard week, then very likely Thursday will not have the same meaning for you.
What does Thursday mean for you? What notable or special events in your life do you associate with Thursday? What is the single best thing that ever happened to you on a Thursday?

“Make time!” is a phase that rings hollow in our ears. How often have you been told to make time for something that you needed to do? Do you know what you can make time out of? Is time made out of clay or wood or steel? Are there blueprints for making time? As valuable as time is, I know of no one who can professionally make time. Only God can make time. If we could “make time” we would also be gods, since God was the only one in the bible who made time.”

Of course, you might say that I am missing the point or at least not responding accurately to the true meaning of the phrase. What people really mean is that they want us to find the time, to reprioritize our time or to drop something else that we are spending time on so that we can do something else. None of the activities that we can do to reschedule our time really “make” time; they simply shift our priorities or they shift what we spend our time on. If I could really make time, I could have a 48 hour day each week in which I could catch up on things. While everyone else would only have a 24 hour day, my day would be twice as long. I would say “today, I have 48 hours.” I would not want to have to work twice as long or twice as hard. I would simply “will” my day to have 48 hours compared to the rest of the world. As I watched each of you work, it would appear that you were moving in slow motion compared to me. One day like this each week would be enough.

If I could sell this ability to make time, think how rich I would be. How many people would love to be able to purchase a 48 hour day each week? How much would they pay for it? What would I make this time out of is another question. The third law of thermodynamics states that matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed but simply changed from one form to another? I would be making something out of nothing which again is beyond mere mortals. But what if you and I could make time simply by willing it so? How much extra time each week would you make for yourself? Why? What would you do with it? Would you share it with others or keep it for yourself?