I'm feeling a little better since my blog post last night. Maybe it's because I realized that I can spend my time how I choose. If I don't want to spend my evening doing homework for school, I don't have to. Now I just have to stop stressing about the consequences.
I thought about time as a resource a lot today. Time is valuable like money or gold or oil but it has some unique characteristics that prevent you from treating it like a currency.
Time can't be stored. You can't put it in a bank to use later. Sure you can "save time" by doing something quickly and immediately create a little extra time but you still can't store it for later use.
Time is limited. Again, unlike money which you can accumulate, you only get a limited amount of time. 24 hours per day. And everyone gets this exact same amount. Nobody is rich or poor in terms of time.
You can buy time. You can pay someone to do things that would cost you time to do them yourself. Some examples are cooking, cleaning, or yard work. But even buying time, you can't buy more than 24 hours in a day.
You own your time. Time is like an allowance, you get 24 hours at the beginning of every day. You can choose to spend it how you wish but whatever you don't spend at the end of the day, you lose. This is the part that I feel like I've been bad about lately. I've haven't been protecting the time I own. It's sort of like losing a wallet full of money, you feel bad because you didn't get to spend it on what you wanted. Someone else spent it for you instead. I aim to fix this in the next week.
Time doesn't grow. You can't speed up or slow down time. You can't collect interest on your time (because you can't save it.) You can't spend it at a rate any faster or slower than the second hand on a clock.
Since time is limited, in both how many hours we have per day and how many days we have in our lives (that part is different for everyone) I plan to start spending mine more wisely and trying to reclaim ownership of the time I've got. Less doing stuff that I have to do and more doing stuff that I want to do.
Copyright 2008 Vincent Chiaro
3 comments:
Well said!
Great observations, Vince. But you are having a baby very soon. You will look at the clock in terms of minutes rather than hours. Your life will be forever changed...and in a wonderful way.
Mom
And there is one circumstance where you can expand time almost indefinitely: Pass into a black hole.
The immense gravitational forces bend the fabric of space-time so much that you will experience immediate destruction, but I will be able to watch you fall into the black hole for thousands of years.
So... there's always that option.
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