You have the exact right amount of time.
“I don’t have enough time”. Be honest, how often have these words escaped your lips? It’s a symptom of our frantic lives, our relentless striving, the background pressure brought upon us by the endless shit we’re missing out on. It feels like such a true and honest statement. ‘I ran out of time, I had so much on my plate’, ‘I didn’t have time’. But, you know, its a lie.
You have the exact right amount of time. It’s not physically possible for you not to have time, unless you are dead. Time, you see, is not a variable. Time is fixed, it is the same for each and every one of us, it doesn’t vary, it is always, unbreakably, constant. We never either do or do not have time. You do not have time, because it is not a thing you are guaranteed to receive, none of us know we have the next few hours, or weeks or decades. It’s not promised, its not haveable.
Rather, you exist in time, one second at a time. And during that moment, and from one to the next, you exist and act. You choose to act in this way or that, put your attention on one thing or another, and in so doing, neglect all other things for that particular moment. I am not the first to write about how we can manage our activities and attention but not our time. I think the concept is fairly easy to understand and maybe even a little weary by now. So this isn’t a piece beating that exact drum. Rather, I want to draw your attention to how this lie, that you deploy more often than you realise, facilitates a step outside integrity.
Let’s say, for example, you’re a successful and busy business person. You’re frantic, you’re fighting fires, big ones, and your time is dominated by work. You miss the gym. In fact you miss training all but once a week on a Saturday morning for months. For you training is an important part of your life, it keeps you healthy and sharp, it gives you energy and will certainly help to keep you performing at your best for years to come. Even keep you healthy enough to enjoy life outside of work (yes, such a thing exists). But right now you don’t have time. At least, thats the story you’ve selected.
You say you don’t have time. It feels honest and genuine, after all, look how damn busy you are. Furthermore, it feels guilt free, it absolves you of any agency, it even places you as the victim of your circumstance. You’d love to train, but your too busy, you don’t have time. But it is a lie, and a very convenient one at that. You have the same time as ever. There are no fewer hours or minutes in your days now than there always have been and always will be. The fact is you choose to spend time on work instead of training. Read that sentence again, emphasise “choose”.
I am not saying you’re wrong to do this, maybe it is exactly the correct choice for this week, or month. But it is a choice and that is the focus to which I’d like to draw your awareness. The lie of “I don’t have time”, lets you off the hook. It absolves you of your complicity in the state you claim so strongly not to want. The truth would be something more like ‘I choose to not train and put my focus on work for this period of time’. No that takes ownership! It puts the choice, and thus the agency to choose, squarely in your palms. In so doing you take responsibility for that choice, and maybe, now you feel a twang of guilt about missing the gym that wasn’t there before. Robbed of your easy out, you find yourself no longer the victim of circumstance, but the knowingly complicit agent of an active, and difficult choice.
I don’t mean to implore you to hit the gym over working those extra few hours, although a great case could be made for doing so, I suppose. Rather I mean to implore you to cast away this convenient and blatant lie. It allows you to absolve yourself of the responsibility you bare for your difficult choices. In absolving that responsibility, you abdicate agency. In abdicating agency you make yourself a victim of circumstance, and rob yourself of your power to act wilfully for your own good. Every single time you claim, “I didn’t have time”. Stop yourself short and correct the sentence to “I chose to ….. instead” or similar. Yes, you will notice pangs of guilt, flashes of disappointment on other peoples faces, maybe even start a few fights. All these things are feedback from yourself and the world that maybe, just maybe, you chose wrongly. Or that the things to which you surrender your time are not the most virtuous path you could take. It is precisely this painful feedback you seek to avoid when you employ this lie. The lie facilitates the continuation of those choices, and the likely steps out of integrity they truly represent.
This example uses work as the source of time drain. But other common examples I have seen regularly include social media, gaming (in younger people), and Netflix. Can you imagine being brave enough to honestly tell your partner you didn’t call the energy company to give a meter reading because you chose to watch Netflix. Or tell your friend you didn’t read the draft of her book you said you would, because you chose to play games for three hours instead?
My message is to take ownership, face the feedback that honesty about your choices gives you daily. Refuse to avoid this because of the lie that you don’t have time. You have the exact right amount of time. You always will. The self correction that complete integrity around our use of time, give us is a valuable gift.
