Time
How are you going to spend yours ?
Last night I was reading before bed, and one chapter touched on time, on how humans tend to live without acknowledging how much of it we actually have left. Because we can’t see our time running out, we squander it: scrolling, watching Netflix, numbing ourselves, worrying.
And it made me wonder: what if we could see time passing? Would it change the way we live and what we choose to prioritize? With an hourglass, you can watch the sand funnel from top to bottom, a minute slipping away, forever gone. When I was little, I found that mesmerizing. At 41, I feel the weight of each grain differently. You don’t get time back. Where you are today in your life is the direct result of how you spent your time last year, and the year before, and the year before that.
We only get so many hours in a day. How do you want to spend them? If the hours left in your life were stacked like coins, each coin representing an hour, where would the biggest piles be? Work, family, self-growth, material things, screens?
I closed the book after that chapter and sat with the thought. I fell asleep eventually, but I think my mind kept processing the weight of those words all night. I woke up early, anxious. I needed to talk about time.. needed to get it out of my head and onto paper.
As I write this, I’ve set a timer for myself — no more than 30 minutes on substack. Not because I want to turn into some hyper-productive time manager, but because when you realize you don’t have a lot of time (and let’s be honest, we don’t), it suddenly becomes precious.
I decide to start my morning differently today with 20 minutes of breath work. I don’t usually begin my days this way, but after taking a breath work class last week, the practice felt strangely relevant to the storm of worry gathering inside me. Time. How are you going to spend yours? This kept cycling back to me in my mind as I sat still, welcoming the breath in and out.
And then it came to me. Realizing the value of your time and that of others, might be the most powerful lesson in life. Any maybe, learning to honor our time is just learning how to honor ourselves. Because the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the years.. they’re our story ! So let’s be intentional with how we spend our time and who we give it to because the time thats left, it’s worth choosing.
With love,
Cale