Devaluing Time

As we move into an age where science and open communication across cultures has made the belief in an afterlife impossible for many of us, we’re met with a very intense reality: this tiny lifetime, this blink of an eye in a cosmic sense, is probably all that we have. The thought alone is enough to send you into a spiral of despair, and it’s one we really haven’t found an answer to. How can you accept that? Our identities, our egos, our minds, our existences, it is all that we have. And it seems that the more we accept that death is a permanent end as an undeniable fact, the more we do all we can to push that thought out of our minds.

But the faster we run from our existential dread, the more we devalue time. Time, the thing we just identified as our most limited and precious resource, is the thing we deny ourselves of the most. The obsession with busyness is seen all around us: it’s commonplace to brag about how little we’ve slept or to lament about our never-ending commitments. When we finally reach the weekend, we fill it with errands and so many hours of television that the daylight slips away and we find ourselves furious to discover that Monday morning is creeping back already. Yet, we can’t stop.

If we stop, we think. If we stop, those thoughts of immortality and human limitations and disappointments begin to creep in.

This is why so many of us have our scariest moments while we’re lying awake in our beds, waiting for the escape of sleep. It’s one of the few times we are actually still. We find it so easy to spend each day numbing our minds with meaningless work and each evening essentially turning our brains off while we absorb television shows meant solely for distraction. And every moment in between is spent scrolling through our smart phones on autopilot, scrolling past updates from friends we don’t really know, scanning made up lives of celebrities that haven’t really accomplished anything besides a few million online followers. Meanwhile, all of life’s truly special features are at our fingertips, but by their nature they require our mind’s presence. Spending quality time with friends and family, enjoying the utterly magnificent power and beauty of nature, embracing quietness and solitude, these are all things that contain true power and potential for growth and expanding your mindset, but presence is scary. It can be terrifying to embrace the reality around us. If we began to value time the way it deserves, if we began to see each day as a precious gift and to use each one with the respect that it deserves, then we have to come to terms with how little time we really have. We would have to truly embrace the reality that tomorrow is never guaranteed, and that each moment should be regarded as such.

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