Spending time
Read time: 10 minutes
60, 24, 7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 12
I’m pretty sure everyone reading knows what those number refer to (the number of seconds in a minute or minutes in an hour, hours in a day, days in a week, days in a month, months in a year).
But what does 3.000.000.000 (3 billion) refers to?
That’s the rough number of beats a human heart will work for in one lifetime.
That’s all the time you will ever have: 3 billion beats.
All the life will ever live shall be within those 3 billion heart beats and I think you just skipped one.
“Everyone knows they’re going to die,” he said again, “but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.” - Tuesdays with Morrie
By the time we are 25, we have already spent 930.000.000 (930 million) beats.
That means by the time we are still considered a young adult, we have spent 1 third of our lifetime.
As stated before in this blog post, life is pretty short.
We simply can’t afford to pursue the unimportant.
There isn’t much time to dabble in that which is meaningless, yet there is just enough time that if we spend it well, we may actually accomplish anything we set out to live in a lifetime.
168
You know what that is?
That is the number of hours in a week.
The total amount of time every successful and unsuccessful human, every happy and depressed person, every parent or bachelor has in a given week.
Nobody HAS more time in a given week.
All of us have just 168 hours and that is it.
Why is it, then, that some of us seem to accomplish more in 1 week than others do in a month?
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. —ANNIE DILLARD
The resource we don’t think we spend
"Time is the coin of your life.
It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.
Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you"
~ Carl Sandburg
Have you ever stopped to actually question the phrase “to spend time”?
By it’s very definition, time is a currency.
It is arguably THE currency you are given in a lifetime.
You are given a set amount (roughly 3 billion) of ‘time coins’.
What you do with them is completely up to you and nobody else.
As with any currency, the way you spend your time coins may actually shorten their amount.
Acts such as smoking, heavy alcoholism and unhealthy eating will obviously give you a bad Return On Investment (a negative one, that is).
The thing is… Time coins don’t act like any other valuable currency we are used to in our modern world.
Time transcends generations, it changes its value depending on the person that has it.
Time is a unique resource.
It is a non-renewable currency that has its own rules.
No deposits, no returns.
"Spend the afternoon.
You can't take it with you!"
- Annie Dillard
You can’t make deposits of time.
You can’t trade time with others.
You can’t invest your time in order to get MORE time.
You can only spend it.
You can’t even ‘take time’ to think about how you want to spend your time.
Every second is a time coin you give away.
Inaction is an action in and of itself.
What you CAN do is spend your time mindfully.
You can choose to take a different approach to spending time.
You can choose to INVEST time.
As I said before, you can only spend your time, but there is a catch.
Whenever we DO spend time, we get SOMETHING in return.
When we spend time with our loved ones, we run the risk of creating a stronger bond.
When we spend time practicing our favorite sport, we may get better at it.
When we spend time with a friend, we might consolidate a greater friendship.
Therefore, time is a resource which converts into other resources:
A better health (when you apply your time into things which we may consider ‘good’ habits, sports and foods);
A great memory (when we choose to invest it into a fun evening with friends);
A dad bod (when we choose to sit on the couch and mindlessly watch Netflix);
“You don’t build the life you want by saving time. You build the life you want, and then time saves itself. Recognizing that is what makes success possible.” - Laura Vanderkam
What should we spend it on?
As we established, we have 1 resource which we are losing by the second.
We are trading that resource (time coins) for something else.
What should that something else be?
If you’ve read my blogs so far, you know I advocate for finding what is meaningful for you in life and pursuing it with everything you have.
You literally can’t afford the time to not chase that which is important to you (whatever that form it may take for you).
"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use." - Earl Nightingale
By that very idea, then, I would argue that we should take some time (pun intended 😉 ) to think about what we want to trade our time coins for, no matter how daunting, no matter how impossible it is.
The very excuse of “I don’t have time for that” simply doesn’t apply.
Just because your heart has just pumped this very bit of blood into your body, you DO have time.
The only thing is not ‘how we make time’, but rather what we find valuable to sink our time into.
For that I have a few books suggestions you could sink your time coins into and a great Youtube video on the matter:
You only have 3 billion heart beats.
How will you choose spend yours?
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose". - Steve Jobs