Time Flies : The Little Letter Series: Delights of the Ordinary No. 59 (S2)
The perfection will never arrive, we won’t be prosperous by replicating Bill Gates's life, and we never ever will have eternally happy bosses!
#TheLittleLetters is my new series where I send you tiny letters of little learnings as opposed to long-form essays. They may help you gear back or throttle up but I promise most of them will be positively wise.
Weekends are pretty obvious. Aren’t they?
Because they come and go like lightning.
Then even weekdays are obvious too. They too hastily come and go. And it is no wonder that in our jet-speeding culture, everything is of exploding urgency and about suffocating time pressures.
Hence, the small philosophies that have helped me consider this flying nature of time are: “The days are long, but the years are short.”
Another one is “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”
For in the very spirit of our days lies our relationship with the time. The times we carve into our daily rhythms will echo the beats of our entire life.
Philosopher Jacob Needleman writes, To live “in closer relationship to biological time, the pulses and rhythms of nature, the sun and the moon, the tides, the seasons, the light and darkness, all the measures and meters of the music of the earth and the skies.”
While in utmost honest functionalities of our days, we certainly won’t be able to measure the music of the earth and keep up with the moons and the tides, but we can treat time with honour and can learn to establish a better relationship with it.
Hence, the discerning wisdom is gathered into these two things:
where our attention lies in our present and
who or what takes most of our time.
Oliver Burkeman, writer of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals says “Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent… Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.”
He writes further, “The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead — and work with them, rather than against them — the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”
Perfection will never arrive, we won’t be prosperous by replicating Bill Gates's life, and we never ever will have eternally happy bosses! The certitude is that we have this stretch of a single moment, which in increments enlarges into many days and years.
Thence, let’s take the time out to feel what we haven’t felt for years. Because time lives in us, and we can carve it, sculpt it into songs and cadences. And share it with people we love by being present with them, giving them our genuine attention, renouncing our phones for some time and remembering we are here not forever.
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,”
Psychiatrist Eric Berne
To round off my letter, here are some facts published on The Guardian lifestyle webpage which are worth noticing!
We as a generation check our smartphones almost every 12 minutes as we wake up. 71% of people would never turn their phone off and 40% of people check them within five minutes of waking up.
The more we are distracted by emails and phone calls our IQ sees a 10-point fall, twice the number that smoking marijuana can do to us!
Until next week. May you weather your storms and sail smoothly with the wind.
- Anugrah
In case you missed it: Read my previous post:
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. You can know more about me here. I write Delights of the Ordinary which currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, We Imagine Because We Are Living or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
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