By Bryce Klingonsmith
“Avoid the pains of an overly busy life. ”
One of the greatest beauties in life is the idea of redemption: to be saved from what has gone wrong. We can make amends to those we have hurt. We can forgive those who have wronged us. And, although we sometimes need help, we can find healing from any of the innumerable ills that may befall us while on our mortal journeys. But, as much as life seems willing to give back things once lost, there is a severe and immutable boundary that has been set on the gift of time. The rule with no exceptions is that we simply can never get time back once we have lost it. The opportunities and privileges of past moments that were not taken advantage of are decidedly gone.
“Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.”
Lucky for you and me, this is not a problem without a solution! I would like to share with you a defining moment in my life when I realized that time meant everything.
When I was in high school, I was encouraged to apply for a generous yet competitive scholarship. I was pleased to discover several months after turning in my application that I had been selected as a recipient of the award. An exciting part of this was that the organization that was offering the scholarships hosted an out-of-state weekend seminar every year for all of their new scholarship recipients. What I will remember more than what was shared about the scholarship or the good food that they gave us was a presentation given by Corey Ciocchetti, a University of Denver Professor of ethics.
Corey had us participate in a curious practice. He asked everyone in the audience to take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, he asked us to make a list of the top 8 things that we were spending our time on in that moment. Just 8 things, in whatever order they took precedence. Then, on the other side, we were asked to write the top 8 things that were most important to us. These could be tangible things, like family, education, work, or spirituality. He then proceeded to tell us the story of how he had once lost a lot of time. As a younger man, he had worked tirelessly to graduate from law school and get an impressive job at a prestigious law firm. There, he found success early on. With every accomplishment he made, however, everything else in his life was being drowned out, and all the money and respect that he was earning could not compensate for the hollowness he was feeling inside.
It all came to a point when the managing partner in his law firm invited him into his office and extended him another hard-earned promotion—a rank that was of particular prominence, especially for a lawyer of his age. Corey then confessed that he had actually been thinking of quitting the firm. Taken aback—and perhaps offended—the managing partner walked him through the halls of the firm, pointing out the incredible status and material wealth being accrued by the lawyers of his firm. They drove sophisticated cars, owned eloquent houses, and had impressive reputations among their peers. What Corey really noticed, however, was that most of his coworkers’ home relationships were failing. Their lives were void of hobbies, passions, or really anything truly worthwhile. Many of them had even moved mattresses into their offices in order to spend more time at work. What he really saw was the consequence of excessive amounts of time spent chasing something that could never be attained. He saw the mere vestiges of people running aimlessly on the never-ending hedonic treadmill.
It was at that moment that he became poignantly aware of his own misery. The time he was investing into something that gave no valuable return, he concluded, had become too much, and he promptly quit the industry.
The man that I saw there presenting to our group of recent high school graduates seemed, in a word, vibrant. He told us that he began a career as a college ethics professor. He recounted the vast improvements that he saw in his married life and in his own mental health. He recounted how his life had drastically increased in meaningfulness, pleasure, and satisfaction, all as a result of his life’s course correction and consequent rebalancing.
At the conclusion of Corey’s presentation, he asked us to take out the papers that we had written at the beginning of his talk and take a look at the lists we had made of things we were spending our time on and the lists of things that were really important to us. What was it that really made Corey so miserable during his years as a lawyer? And what was the true reason his course correction had returned a sense of meaning and vitality to his life? He told us that it was in the way he spent his time. He shared that if he had done the exercise that we were doing during his time as a lawyer, his list of things he was spending his time on would have looked completely different from the list of things that truly mattered to him. It was the change in the way that he invested his time that made all the difference. His list of time investments and things that really mattered had become roughly the same list.
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot. ”
What if you held in your hand a similar list of time investments and things that really mattered. Would you like what you saw? Would the lists look anything like each other? Or would you realize that the things you cherish most are not getting the kind of attention you’d like?
Since that scholarship retreat the summer after high school, the practice of balancing my time investments with what I care about the most has always remained at the forefront of my mind. While it has never quite been feasible for me to perfectly match these two lists—which, by the way, it never is—I have let this practice of prioritizing my time investments guide so many of my choices. Furthermore, I have done that same exercise with countless residents of the various treatment centers I have worked at. I find it marvelous to see a person’s reaction when they realize for the first time why spending all their time on drugs, sex, and video games wasn’t quite working for them. It has thus become apparent to me that the way we spend our time has a lot to do with our happiness and well-being.
The solution to the unstoppable passage of time is not to build a time machine or to reduce your sleep to 3 hours every night, but rather to live in a way that will steer you toward satisfaction and away from regret. So, take time now to become mindful of how you are spending your time. Take time to determine what matters most to you. Write both of those lists down and see if they look like one another. By doing this, you’re off to a great start to becoming better aware of where you’d like to spend more of your time. Best of all, that’s a change you can work towards. If those lists feel shallow or incomplete, you may stand to benefit from our modules on values, gratitude, savoring, and supportive relationships. If you’re like many others, however, you might just stand in need of some guidance on how to become fully engaged with everything that is important to you, to maintain your priorities, and to live in greater harmony with the things that truly matter. If this sounds like you, then our module on Engaged Living may be particularly pertinent.
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”