Remember to Live in the Moment
You get home after a long day of work, school, errands, or other obligations. You set your things down, and take stock of the evening ahead. You're alone for the moment, and dinner isn't for another hour. Unexpectedly, you find yourself with a brief span of free time; that invaluable, mythical state of existence where you allow yourself to do whatever you want to do. These are the gaps in the day that you look forward to, the breaks between responsibilities where you can read or write or meditate or play a game or watch a sunset or whatever it is that you love.
So you sit down to seize this rare opportunity.
But before you get to living in this free time, you decide to read that email you got on your way home. It's just one email, you'll be done with it in a minute. You pull out your phone and see a social media notification. Impulsively, you check that first. Several minutes go by and you're responding to posts from your favorite accounts. Why did you pull your phone out again? Oh, right, you were going to order that thing you needed for your weekend trip you have to take with your family. As you’re doing this, you get a text message from a friend; that politician you hate said something stupid in an interview again. You must find out what they said. You absent-mindedly go to your kitchen for a snack while you catch up on the day's political gossip. "That email," you remember. It's from an old friend, so you sit down to craft a detailed response, and just as you hit send, you realize it's dinner time.
No more time for that book or that meditation or that game. No more free time to live the way you want to live. It's time to get back to work.
You forgot to live your life.
This type of occurrence is so commonplace that Seneca described a similar experience almost 2,000 years ago:
“Just as travelers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace – the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.”
We are so accustomed to losing these moments, we do not notice them slipping by. We don’t recognize the wasted hours, so the hours become days, the days become months, the months become years. Before we know it, our life has passed in a blur, lived without intention instead of how we desired. We think we are passing the time, but really, the time is passing us.
We Misspend what we do not budget
Time is the one resource we cannot reclaim, and yet it is immensely difficult to assign with a proper value. We do this easily with any other finite resource, like our salary or wage; unlike money, we struggle to budget our time as it passes by. Perhaps we cannot budget our time properly because our time is not guaranteed to us. We simply don’t know how much we have. But when we know we might be out of a job, we become more frugal, reducing our expenditures to hedge against a potential loss. We do not similarly budget our time with such an uncertainty ever present in our lives.
Why, though? It’s not a matter of ability. We can easily track our time. There are no shortages of clocks, calendars, notebooks, and electronic assistants. Even the Earth seems to be intent on reminding us, moving in cycles, changing the seasons, marking the passage of time in ways we can’t ignore.
Our brains don’t seem to want to acknowledge all of these signs. Instead of using the ubiquity of clocks to remind of us of our irreplaceable time, we use clocks to demarcate one event from another, keeping ourselves busy from appointment to appointment. Calendars do not provide us with a measure of our days, but with a schedule we must fill with commitments. The nature of the tools has not solved the problem of misspent time, and perhaps only exacerbates a flaw in human nature itself.
What if, however, we were fully aware of the finite nature of time allotted to us? What if the tools we made for ourselves didn’t enable us to spend our time, but to value it?
Keeping in mind that our time is limited and that we will some day die is a powerful method to help us value our time. Just as a limited income helps us value our money, awareness of limited time helps us value our lives. When we are aware that time is passing by, we begin to treat it differently.Time is no longer something to be filled, but to be appreciated; no longer something to pass, but to seize.
We are all mortally Ill
To understand the impact of this way of thinking, imagine visiting a doctor for a routine visit. The doctor identifies something concerning, and a few scans later, the doctor informs you that you have a mortal illness. You have a few months left to live, and you must get your affairs in order. How does such a diagnosis alter the perception of time for each of us?
Immediately, we would stop wasting time. All the plans we had for the remainder of our lives would be compressed into a few months rather than an innumerable amount of years, and so we would set out with urgency to fulfill those plans. Our perspectives around the important and unimportant would also change. We would see all our petty squabbles for what they are, and we would realize that all the little things we took for granted were not little things at all. We might have never noticed the way the sun feels on our skin when we first step outside for the day, or how air flows around our nostrils when we breath, but all of those sensations become beautiful and even surreal.
Given the diagnosis that we are a short time away from death grounds us. Given a timeline, we cannot forget that time is passing by. We become better stewards for our lives and the precious time we have left. No amount of time is to be fettered away, and every moment becomes invaluable. How rich and beautiful our lives become when we begin to live this way, when our affairs are set in order.
When we number our days, there’s no time to spare on things we didn’t intend to do. It’s impossible to forget to live our lives.
This example is cliché, and yet most of us fail to realize that it is all too applicable to each of us. Whether we received a diagnosis from a doctor or not, we are all mortally ill. We all have a death sentence, not imposed by a court or a king, but by nature. Whether our life ends in old age, or whether we fall prey to an unexpected accident in our youth, we are all limited in our time. And not only is this true for each of us, it is true for everyone and everything we love.
We may as well live as if we’ve received a diagnosis for our death, because we have. We can set our affairs in order today, so that when our time ends, we are not caught unprepared. What a life it would be, if our affairs were in order the entirety of our lives.
This thinking is powerful, and it requires no dramatic changes. All we must do is hold on to that truth, that our days are truly numbered and that each moment counts. Remember to live in the moment.
