[A quick foreword: I originally wrote this in 2011. I have since changed my position on one of the key concepts underlying this post. Particularly, I have come to realize that time is not really as absolute of an equalizer as I thought it to be back then. As with many things in life, having the resources that others do not have enables one to use a much more significant portion of their twenty-four hours on activities they deliberately choose, instead of activities they are forced to do out of necessity. For instance, one can hire a gardener, a cook, a nanny, a driver, etc., thus freeing up time to engage in other more leisurely and/or enjoyable activities, whereas someone who does not have the resources would have to do the necessary activities themselves. Other than that, my perspective as captured in this post remains unchanged from when I originally penned it.]
**********
Life.
One can interpret life from two different perspectives. First, life can be deconstructed in terms of the units of time (seconds, minutes, hours) that make up the twenty-four hours allotted to each day, the seven days allotted to each week, the four weeks allotted to each month, the twelve months allotted to each year, and the seventy or so years allotted to a lifetime. But this is somewhat of a passive way to approach the matter. Time will and does lapse whether we act or stay idle; each unit of time that lapses is a unit that is forever gone, whether it was judiciously used for some good purpose or mindlessly squandered away.
The active approach would be to deconstruct life in terms of the decisions and choices that we make within the units of time that have been apportioned to us. In essence, that is what our lives truly are: a series of choices, with each choice made leading to another set of choices, and each set of choices predicated on a previously exercised choice, and so on, until our allotments run out and the capacity to make further choices is taken from us by death, or in certain cases, insanity or senility. By adopting this perspective on life, we are compelled to be engaged participants as opposed to mere bystanders, and we are forced to be accountable for the choices we make, with the knowledge that our choices, and not circumstances or the passage of time, determine the trajectories of our respective lives and, to an extent, the lives of those around us.
At the end of his days, man’s life cannot be meaningfully measured based simply on its duration. Rather, it is best measured in terms of the choices he made over the course of his lifetime, and the type and magnitude of impact those choices had on society. Some of the greatest persons who ever graced this planet did not get to live out the entirety of their allocated time, and yet managed to impact the world in profound, revolutionary, and lasting ways.
======
Although time is an overarching concept that pervades the theme of this entry, this entry is not about time itself. Rather, it is about choices.
As I wrote earlier, our lives are really nothing more than the aggregate of the choices we make. Choices regarding how we spend our time. Choices regarding with whom we spend our time.
At the most basic functional level, we each are given twenty-four hours of time each day within which to exercise our choices. That is the beauty of time. It is the great equalizer. It is the one resource that is granted in equal measure to each human being, regardless of his social station, wealth, gender, nationality, age, or educational attainment. Everyone gets twenty-four hours.
How we choose to use the twenty-four hours is determined by our priorities and the degree of importance we assign to the people around us and the activities we engage in.
One can argue that we do not really have a full twenty-four hours since a certain amount of our time is arbitrarily defaulted for use in activities such as work and sleep. I do not subscribe to this thinking. As far as I know, how much time I spend sleeping or working, or if I even spend any time on said activities at all, is still essentially a matter of my choice, as driven by my priorities.
As it happens, I highly value my health, and sleep deprivation will likely result in its deterioration; ergo, I allocate a significant portion of my twenty-four hours to sleep. I also highly value my ability to be productive and contribute to society, as well as to provide a comfortable lifestyle for myself and my family (future family for now), and failing to work will preclude me from achieving these objectives; hence, I allocate a significant portion of my twenty-four hours to work. I could just as easily decide not to spend any time on sleep or on work if I concluded that there were some other activities I could better use my time on. Sometimes I do just that. Whether or not that is a rational or even sane decision is a different matter altogether.
My point is this: how I use my time is always a matter of my own choice.
======
“I’d love to do that, but I just don’t have the time.”
Oh, how many times I’ve caught myself uttering that excuse in one form or another. I know that whenever I allow myself to think that way, I disempower myself and minimize my capacity to make active choices.
“I don’t have the time” is one of the biggest fallacies ever propagated in the history of mankind. Of course I have the time. I will always have the time, for as long as I am still alive. What I really should say is that I do not believe the activity in question is important, or it is not important enough relative to the other activities from which I can choose, for me to allocate a portion of my twenty-four hours to its pursuit.
======
I remember an exercise I came across in Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. The exercise involves taking a piece of paper and dividing it in two columns. On the left hand side, the participant is asked to list, in order of priority from most to least important, all the things, people, and activities he deems important. On the right hand side, he is asked to list, in order of allocation from highest to lowest, all the things, people, and activities he actually spends his time on. Finally, he is asked to draw lines connecting the things listed on the left-hand side to the corresponding entries on the right-hand side.
Mostly straight, horizontal lines connecting the things listed on the left-hand side to their counterparts on the right-hand side indicated that the participant was allocating and utilizing his time appropriately. On the other hand, mostly diagonal, criss-crossing lines indicated that the participant needed to re-evaluate his allocation and usage of time.
It’s a very simple yet powerful and potentially life-changing exercise. I highly recommend that you try it sometime. When I tried it, I was shocked to realize the degree to which I have been misappropriating my time, and how skewed my utilization is towards those things that are of insignificant import to me, at the expense of those I most value.
======
One of the unfortunate consequences of having to apportion a finite amount of time to a potentially infinite number of choices is that our choices sometimes collide and we are forced to make very tough decisions.
I am not here referring to obvious choices between an option that is detrimental and one that is beneficial, or even to a scenario where both options are beneficial, but one is clearly superior to the other. I am referring to the choices we have to make between two or more equally beneficial or desirable options, where one option appears to be just as good as the other. How do we make the right choice when faced with such options? Is there even such a thing as a right or wrong choice in those situations? If so, what are the objective indicators that we made the right choice?
=====
Sometimes, I find myself wishing that life did not have to be all about making choices (and often complex ones), because as long as we humans have the option to choose, the possibility, and even likelihood, that we make the wrong choices always exists. In our sinful state, we have the predilection for choosing wrong, and the repercussions of our wrong choices can have very devastating effects on ourselves and those we care for.
Further, was it not an act of exercising a wrong choice that doomed humanity, pre-Calvary, to an existence consisting of needless misery, disease, and degradation in the first place? If our sinless ancestors were unable to utilize their perfect intellect, untainted predispositions, and direct and intimate access to the Creator Himself to spare themselves from making the wrong decision, what chance do we stand as broken and sinful beings, eons removed from direct communion with our God?
The world around us is rife with unmistakable manifestations of our defective decision-making faculties. As a race, we are systemically and fundamentally broken at our core. We choose to destroy each other. Wage war against each other. Cheat against each other. Deceive each other. Abuse each other. We choose to carry on lives of mediocrity and utter lack of responsibility and accountability. We choose to use the resources we are blessed with to indulge in wanton pleasure, oblivious, or worse yet, indifferent to the plight of those around us who cannot even gain access to the most basic of needs.
But then, I think about the alternative and immediately chide myself for entertaining such foolish thoughts. I would much rather be at risk for making the wrong choice than not have any choice at all. Just imagine how dull and miserable life would be if everything we did had been foreordained and we were simply acting out predetermined roles in some cosmic script. What would be the point to living if our lives were not really even ours to live in the first place? All things considered, a wrong choice made freely is still vastly superior to a right one made under duress or coercion. A right act carried out in the absence of a choice to act otherwise is essentially meaningless.
Leave a Reply