Aging Capriciously

Beating time: what does it mean when we say that we are going to beat time? Is beating time like beating a dead horse, like beating notes, or like beating the competition? Can we beat time? Is time the ultimate chess player or poker player? The one gamester in the world who cannot be beaten? Is time the grandmaster of life?

What if I told you about a secret book: “One Thousand and One Ways to Beat Time” that I am writing? Would you want to rush out to buy it? Perhaps you would not need it. You may think you are already beating time when you multi-task. Are you more efficient and attentive when you try to do two or more things at the same time? Do you think people who drive and talk on their cell phones are safer drivers? Are they beating time? How about the drivers that weave in an out of traffic on a busy day; do you think they are beating time? My favorite people are the tailgaters who seem to ignore the fact that there are multiple other drivers in front of me and we are all doing more than the speed limit already.

We can save time by doing things smarter and more efficiently but is that beating time? The clock just keeps on ticking and ticking. What if I took a baseball bat to my clocks and beat the living daylights out of all of them? Would that be beating time or just killing time? Nothing seems to really define this idea of “beating” time. Somehow, time always seems to win. Death is the one inevitability in all of our lives. Rich or poor, genius or idiot, educated or uneducated, holy or unholy, we all have our deaths marked in a ledger someplace and no one has beat time yet.

What does it mean to you to beat time? Do you ever beat time? If so, please send me an email telling me how you do it. I would like to add your idea to my UPCOMING book: “One Thousand and One Ways to Beat Time.” At least then, I would have one idea to add to this book.

Racing the clock seems to be a common occurrence in our world today. We are all familiar with this phrase. In the movies, the hero or heroine race against time as the bomb ticks down or the villains’ ultimatum gets closer. Often lives are at stake and the race has a critical dimension. Solve the puzzle or the bomb goes off! In the Da Vinci code, the hero and heroine race from one puzzle to another as an assortment of evil characters race after them. The drama comes from the clock ticking down as we race madly from one moment to another.

In our daily lives, we may be racing from one event to another. We feel the same stress and have the same pressures without any real catastrophe awaiting us. We race to work, we race home, we race to school, we race to complete our projects on time, we race to the movies, we race to the game and then we race to get to bed before it is too late, only to get up in the morning to start racing the clock again.

For many of us our lives are one big race. Why do we do this? Why incur the stress and anxiety of racing the clock? Do we really enjoy this kind of race? Have we become habituated to “racing the clock?” Is it so common for us that we don’t know how to live our lives without the pressure or experience of this race? Do we really enjoy these races? Do these races provide vicarious excitement for an otherwise dull or boring life? Are we forever doomed to be racing the clock? Heaven forbid! Heaven forbid!

There must be a way out of these rat races. What do you think it is? How can you get out of your races? Can you pick and choose the races you enter? Which ones cost you stress and give you no payback? Which ones are fun and are worth the run? Who makes the choice whether you run or not? Think about it today and look at the races you entered against the clock. Which ones are really worth the running? Who won you or the clock?

Calendars are one of the most interesting ways that we mark time. Calendars can tell us the past, the present and the future. I keep three calendars in our house besides those on my desktop computers. There is something about a physical calendar with its pictures and permanence that computer programs seem to lack. Granted, there are many virtues to Outlook and other software calendar programs. However, I still like to put my post-it notes on one calendar, mark my bills on another calendar and on the third calendar, I mark the time and type of exercise that I have done each day. At the end of the month, I sum my bills and my exercise time and put them in an Excel spreadsheet. I use these various tools as a way of tracking and keeping on track with the most important things in my life.

My calendar with post-it notes is almost a duplicate of my desktop calendar but I still like to look at this calendar each day. With the post it notes, it is very easy to simply take an appointment with me or move it to another day. My “post it notes” calendar helps me keep track of what I want to do now and in the future. I put appointments, planned trips, ideas for things to do and future vacations on this calendar. Thus, while two calendars track things I have done, my third calendar tracks things I will do. Each year, I love to go out and buy interesting calendars. I usually buy three or sometimes four calendars as I like turning them each month and seeing the new pictures or sometimes the information that is on calendars. This year I have a Lonely Planets travel calendar, a fantasy calendar by Luis Royo and a calendar with pictures of butterflies. The Lonely Planet calendar has over 200 pictures of different places and countries and provides a way to dream about new places to visit and see.

My calendars are a very active part of my life and I don’t mind spending thirty or forty dollars on them each year. I can also deduct some of them as a business expense. Calendars can be depressing if all they do is mark the passing of time. Calendars can be very helpful when we are counting the days to the beginning of a new event or something we are eagerly looking forward to. Do you have a calendar? How do you use your calendars? Do they help you to manage your life, look forward to exciting times or simply mark the passing of days?

Do you want to become a “Time Millionaire?” A Time Millionaire has learned how to wisely invest time and get more back than most of us would believe possible. Investing time is a lot like investing money. You cannot make money if you do not invest money. You may make a salary each week, but no one ever became a millionaire on just a salary. If you want to make a great deal of money, you must invest money and of course, that means taking a risk. A good business person is willing to take “prudent” risks. The same applies to getting more time in your life. You must invest time to make time. The time that you get each day is your “salaried” time. You will never become a “Time Millionaire” on just your weekly “salary” of time. You must invest time to make millions in time and that means taking a risk. The risk is that your time investment might not work out and you will not receive the extra time you hope to have earned.

Have you ever noticed that successful people seem to be able to accomplish so much? They seem to have more time than the rest of us. Their secret is that they have learned the ins and outs of “time investing.” Most of the rest of us just hoard our time. Hoarding time is like putting your money under the bed. It will not do you any good there. You must spend time to make more time. What you spend your time on is the key. It is the principle that applies to what you spend your money on. If you spend your money on buying frivolous things, you will not make money. If you spend your time on frivolous pursuits, you will not make more time. How can time multiply? The same way that money multiplies. Other people will lend, give or sell you their time and the multiplier effect works the same way with time that it does with money.

Smart business people invest with other people’s money. Smart time managers invest with other people’s time. Following are three keys to wise time investment. The first key is to learn how to ask other people for help. A smart time manager know when to aks others for help. A second key is to learn how to network and create more leverage from those you know and also those you don’t know. This key helps you build a larger network of people who may be smart investments. A third key is to generously give time to other people. This time will come back to you many times over when these same people will someday be happy to provide you with their time or help you later on.

Watching TV each week is not investing time. Helping a friend, going back to school, working on a part-time business, writing a book, learning to play an instrument are all good investments of time. When you invest time in worthwhile goals and in worthwhile people you will soon find your time multiplying. You will begin to accomplish more and more by spending less and less time. You will soon find you are becoming rich with time. You are on your way to becoming a “Time Millionaire.” You will someday have more time and accomplish more than you ever dreamed was possible.

How much of your time is spent frivolously each week? How much time are you spending watching TV or watching sports? How much time are you spending on good investments? How could you increase the amount of time you invest each week?

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. How many times have you seen or heard this little phrase? It would almost be trite if it were not so powerful a thought. Did you get up this morning and think: “The rest of my life starts now” or “Today is a new beginning” or “I can start all over and lead a new life.” I would bet you got up, took a shower, got dressed, made a coffee and went out the door, praying for the roads to be good and that there is little traffic. You also made a note to try to get up a little earlier tomorrow. You have been making these notes for twenty years but seldom do they work, so you are now rushing to get to work on time. Thoughts of a new beginning or a new day are far far away. And so, a new day began for you, but NOT a new set of opportunities.

The opportunities are only there for the people that can take the time to seize them. We are often too busy rushing to even see the opportunities for a new life and a new start that surrounds us. We continue to live today exactly as we did yesterday and we wonder “when, oh when, will things chance?” Well, think about it, as someone once said the definition of craziness is “keep doing the same things and expect different results.”

When will you seize the opportunity to change your life, to see things differently, to begin a new day with new commitments, to improve your life and to begin the life you dream of living? If you keep doing the same things you did yesterday and the day before, nothing will change for you. Do you want to live a better live? Do you want to improve your life?

Then right now make a list of things that you would like to see different in your life. Do you want to travel more? Do you want to make more money? Do you want to have more love and romance in your life? Now from your list, prioritize the things that are most important to you. Take one thing today and make today the day that you start working towards that goal. Each week start working on one goal or one priority. Before you know it, you will be living the life that you want to live and not the one you HAVE to live.

Horny Time – Do you find it difficult to talk about sex? Most Americans seem to have a fixation with sex but a very difficult time to talk openly about it. According to Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of “The Female Brain,” men think about sex every 52 seconds, while women tend to think about it just once a day. Apparently, men are thinking about sex a great deal more than women. I believe this “finding” reflects a stereotype about men and women in a traditional orientation to sex. In our world today, symbols and elements of sex are ubiquitous. We are bombarded with an average of 1500 advertisements a day and many of these rely on the old adage “sex sells.” Both men and women are getting “sexier” regardless of how often each supposedly thinks about it.

Recent studies show that the older men get, the “softer” they get. Forty four percent of American men over sixty report having a problem with getting an erection. Men might be thinking about sex but a great deal but with many it does not go much further than that. Why spend so much time thinking about something, when we can’t do anything about it? Of course, with the right drugs, we can all become overnight sex studs.

On one level, we treat sex as a normal part of everyday life, but at a deeper level, we are still like little kids for whom sex is naughty and evil. We never quite get over those childhood messages about sex being bad. As adults, we think about sex, dream about sex and fantasize about sex. We watch movies where everyone has marathon sex bouts in which they go at it all night long and start over again in the morning. When most of us measure our reality against such fantasies, reality comes up short. Thus, we prefer not to talk about reality. We ignore it or pretend we don’t have a problem but the problem does not go away. Our sex lives seldom measure up to the Hollywood standard.

Problems that are not dealt with sometimes get better, but more often they get worse.
How much time do you spend talking about sex openly and candidly with your significant other? Can you talk about what you like and what you don’t like? What turns you on and what turns you off? Do you put time away each week or every so often to talk about sex? How would you rate your sex life? What would it take to improve it?

“Taming Time” would be an interesting title for a book. I typed this phase “Taming Time” in on the Amazon Book site and came up with 417 hits. A quick look down the results showed numerous books with this title. Most of them seemed to focus on time management or tips to “tame” time. The metaphor or allusion to time seems to indicate that it is a wild beast that needs to be tamed. However, have you ever tried to tame a wild beast? Would you trust a so called tamed lion or tiger around your children? Can we really time a wild beast?

If time is a wild beast, are we perhaps kidding ourselves by thinking that “201 tips” on time will tame this beast? What if time were not tamable? What if we just had to live with this beast? Perhaps there is a better opportunity for an original book on time titled: “Living with the Beast of Time.” Well, how do we go about living with a wild beast? I suppose you must have plenty of patience, courage and awareness towards the beast. You might always have to be on guard for some moment when the beast reverts to its natural state. You could never fully trust that the beast might not someday become wild and violent.

If you are living with a wild creature, you have to respect it. A lack of respect could really get you in trouble with a lion or tiger. I think the same is true for time. Do you respect time? How do you treat the time in your life? Do you see it as a wild or domesticated creature? Do you think you can tame it?

Time and priorities seem to go hand in hand. Some say that time is all about setting priorities. I often think that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, a more honest reply would be: “It’s not that important to me or not as important as the other things going on in my life right now.” In some time management courses, they teach you to understand the distinction between important and urgent. Some things are both important and urgent and thus you should attend to them right away, others are urgent but not important. The phone ringing tends to define a sense of urgency as it screams to be attended to. We rush to pick it up, only to find a telemarketer on the other end. Other things are important, but do not need to be done right away, thus we put them off and sometimes never seem to get the truly important things done in our lives. We may reflect on these failures when it is too late, as in telling someone we really love them, after they are dead. However, we are too busy with the urgent to spend time on the important.

The no-brainers are the unimportant and un-urgent. Yet, how many of us occupy our time with these true time wasters: the daily news, the TV set, gossip or trivia about sports or movie stars or what so and so wore to the wedding. Studies show the average person watches 3-6 hours of TV a day. Can you think of anything on TV that falls into the urgent or important categories? Yet, how often do you say “I have no time?” What if you answered: “I am sorry, I don’t have the time, I have to watch 6 hours of TV tonight before going to bed?” What would you think if someone said that too you? It might be refreshing if people were more honest.

What method do you use to set priorities in your life? Do you think you have your priorities well balanced? If not, what could you do to better balance your priorities? How much time do you spend on the unimportant and un-urgent each week? How much time to you spend on the truly important? How much time do you spend dealing with the simply urgent? Are you always fighting fires and never getting the important tasks done? Dr. W.E. Deming used to say, “Putting out the fires, does not improve the hotel.”

Friday, Friday, too much too say about this day! Black Friday, Freaky Friday, Good Friday; Casual Friday, Unlucky Friday, TGIF! Can you believe a chain of restaurants, a god and more songs than I could list named after this day? Friday, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon form of Frigga, the Germanic goddess of beauty. Frigga was the goddess of love, marriage, and destiny. She was the wife of the powerful Norse god Odin, The All-Father.

If there were a magic day, it would be Friday. You know the reason why too, don’t you? The last day of the week, payday, the day that three day weekends begin on and a holy day as well. The Easybeats sing: “Monday, I’ve got Friday on my mind.” We can all identify with that song, since many of us start thinking about Friday as soon as we are headed to work on Monday. Even those of us who love our work, often look forward to this last day in the week, the day before our weekend break begins and frequently the day we begin it on early. In Japan, Friday is Kin-Youbi: “Gold Day” or “money day”, and in many Asian cultures, paydays are on Friday (Wikipedia). Friday for others has often been associated with the dreaded pink slips. Instead of getting paid, you receive your layoff notice. Love it, hate it, dread it, fear it, but you cannot ignore Friday.

What do Fridays mean to you? Have Fridays more often been good to you or bad? Do you anxiously wait for each Friday or do you take your days one at a time? What do you like most about Fridays? What if we had a four day week and skipped Fridays? How would you feel about that? Would you miss your Fridays?

Glory time! Halleluiah! Are you waiting for glory time? “It will be a glorious day in heaven that awaits all repentant sinners. However, the fires in hell will burn brighter as they consume the bones and blood of those who fail to repent. Today is Glory Day. Lift up thine eyes to heaven so that you may see what awaits you. The downcast will be lifted up and the exalted will be cast down.” Or so it has been said!

Well, perhaps I exaggerate some, but what could be a more glorious time for some then the day they rise up to get their just rewards? More immediate but more mundane times of glory may await those of us who prefer to tarry on this earth. Many of us yearn for a day of glory; to rise on the pedestal and be recognized for a “once in a lifetime” achievement. – To have a crowd of friends and admirers all standing there to cheer at our success – We have the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Bowl Games, the Super Bowl, the World Series, American Idol and a zillion playoffs, but most of us will never attend one of these, much less play in one or win one.

For most ordinary people, our glory time will be winning a local soccer tournament, or taking first place in our third-grade spelling bee. A good friend of mine recently received notice that he was going to be inducted into an academic Hall of Fame. I once took second place in a father-daughter canoe race. I still keep the trophy. It is the only trophy I have ever received. The irony is that regardless of how small these accomplishments may seem to others, we will never forget the moment or the time of our glory. For the rest of our lives, we will remember our moment of glory. There may be other glory times or more significant times, but glory times are like precious moments of happiness, they come and go all too fast for our liking. That is their nature; can you imagine spending days and weeks in glory time? When was your last glory time? What do you remember about it? Why was it important to you then and now?