How the Inevitable Passing of Time Motivates Me
Every single moment, you have a choice.
Change is hard. Whether it is a small change, like taking 5 minutes to meditate in the morning, or a large change, like starting a new, month-long project, it’s always harder to do something than it is to do nothing.
I touched on one way to fight this natural willingness to stay at rest in my article about the stoic idea of “memento mori”, but there’s another, alternative perspective we can look at this from.
Sure, when we die, our time on this earth will effectively run out. Our personal time is limited.
But, while we’re alive, time continues at a steady and predictable pace. Time is unstoppable. Like death, or taxes, one surety is that time will continue to pass. Until it doesn’t anymore. Can that happen? I don’t know, I’m not a physicist. I digress.
Every second, every minute, and every hour is present for a fleeting moment and then it is gone. In each of these moments we have the same choice we always have: what are we going to do with our precious time?
Some of these moments are already spoken for — we have to sleep, eat, and pay our bills — but not all of them are. We have some choice about how we spend our time, and it is a mandatory choice. If we don’t actively make a choice, we have still chosen; we’ve just chosen the default option, whatever that may be.
It might seem like small moments are worthless, but in reality they are all that we have. A popular example to showcase how small efforts can add up is the example of daily writing.
Write 100 words a day, and in one year you have 36,500 words. Depending on your medium of choice, that might be half a full-length novel. It might be an entire novella. It might be 50 articles published here on Medium. At this point in this article, I’ve written about 300 words, and it’s taken me around twenty minutes.
To account for days when the words come more slowly, let’s say that a conservative estimate for 100 words is 15 minutes. That’s not much time at all, about 1% of our day.
I can hear some people already:
- “Doing something every day for a year is really hard”
- “I’m too tired to start a new habit”
- “I can’t get in the zone in 15 minutes”
I hear you, but you’re missing the point.
The important part isn’t how much any given person can get done in 15 minutes.
The point is two-fold:
- those 15 minutes will pass whether you write or not, and
- 15 minutes of effort is brief, but it is enough time to derive some benefit for most things.
Depending on the choice you make, at the end of 15 minutes you will either have some words, or you will have no words at all.
As time passes, it forces us to cash out and we are saddled with the result of our actions. No refunds.
Each day will pass whether you stick to a healthy diet or not, and your body adapts to those decisions. If you skip your workout, you have accrued a net zero gain of muscle for that day, and that’s that. If you engage in an unhealthy habit, you’ve applied that negative effect to your body and you can’t go back.
All these decisions affect our lives in various ways, and those effects are locked in with the passing of time. For better or for worse, each action has a result, even the “action” of doing nothing at all.
We can choose to improve ourselves and reach toward the things that we want, we can coast and gain nothing, or we can even move away from our goals.
As with any advice, there’s room for this to be taken way too far.
I don’t recommend that anyone try to optimize their life down to the minute. That sounds exhausting. None of us are perfect, and sometimes the mental boost we get from indulging is worth it.
What I do recommend is practicing mindfulness about the decisions that you might not even realize you’re making.
If you’re deciding to skip a workout, because you’d be better off with a rest day, make that choice and own it. If you’re skipping a workout because you defaulted to some other activity that is more comfortable, ask whether you’re OK making that tradeoff.
Time will pass either way, but this thought process is the difference between owning your time and floating along the time stream like a fallen leaf.
It’s very easy to think that “one day” won’t make a difference, but every day is “just one day”. Life is one day, and then another day, and then another.
Each day, you get 96 blocks of fifteen minutes each. Some of those blocks are free to use on whatever you wish. How many? That depends on your lifestyle.
For me, I have about five hours on weekdays that are truly free, or 20 blocks.
Going back to our writing example, I could use those 20 blocks to write 100,000 words in 50 days. That’s an incredible amount of writing, but it is a bit extreme.
Instead, let’s say I do 4 blocks, or a single hour. Most people probably have one hour to spend on something they are passionate about. That’s still 100,000 words within a year, even if you take every weekend off completely.
Isn’t that amazing? It goes to show that you don’t have to overhaul your entire routine. You can create positive change in your life even if you only take control of one hour of your day. Even if you only take control of fifteen minutes.
In the end, we remember we must die, but that doesn’t mean we can’t live. By taking responsibility for your time, you can create a life that is full of… well, whatever you want.
Whatever you were made to do, whatever makes you feel fulfilled and content, do it.
Time will pass, regardless.
