Time…

Time is a construct. That’s not some conspiracy theory, it is a fact. The systems of time tracking were created. Years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds were created. We’re not even all on the same time. I’m not just talking about time zones. I’m talking about the fact that it is 2018 in Ethiopia. The Gregorian calendar, which is the one that says it is 2025, didn’t become a thing until 1582. There are other calendars. The Hebrew calendar sits at year 5785. The Chinese lunar calendar is at 4722. The Islamic Hijri Calendar is at 1446 AH. Buddhist calendar is 2568, Assyrian calendar is at 6775, and the Yoruba/Kojoda calendar is 10,067 years old. 

There are cultures in the world that have a 13 month calendar. There are cultures that have a 4 day week. I say all of this to say that time is not something that is written in stone. Homo sapiens are said to have evolved approximately 300,000 years ago. We have at most 10,000 years of preserved human history. That is what we are going off of. A fragment of the time that humans has existed. Most of the history that we gloss over is in the most recent millenia, particularly since the Greek and Roman empires came through and ruined the world. The premise on which we think of time and what dictates time is fairly new in the grand scheme of existence. 

I say all of this to say, as a person that has spent an inordinate amount of my life fixated on timelines and when I should accomplish things by, I realize how ridiculous that is. Nobody has told me the day nor the hour, but as far as I know, I have a good amount of time left. Especially if I move with wisdom. Our life is the whole thing, not just when we’re doing particular things or when we get to where we want to get. I can spend the rest of my days building the life that I want. Obviously, I would rather experience joy and good sooner than later, but those are separate issues entirely. My enjoyment of life should not be based on crossing some finish line, but instead on enjoying the journey. Cradle to the grave, we are here. We can think of how our life is going to matter in the grand scheme of things, but our best bet is to find a way to live that is satisfying as we are doing it.

Big picture, we don’t even know what the world will be like in the next few years. I was born before cell phones were popularized. Computers were still insanely expensive and therefore rare. Now we are in the digital age where people cannot live without screens. It is wild to go from the patience of waiting for dialup to getting annoyed if your connection does not enable things to happen for you on your device instantly. In a world ruled by capitalism, we do not get to enjoy life as the greater populace. Poor people are told that they have to wait decades after selling 8 to 12 hours a day to some major corporation to maybe have some sense of peace and stability. That is outrageous. People who come out the womb knowing nothing but having all of their needs and wants met are telling the people who do the actual work that they just need to work harder and wait the requisite amount of years to have a decent quality of life. People with all of the time in the world because they do not have to spend 40 hours a week plus working in debasing jobs just to be able to live a life they don’t even want continue to sneer at the notion that people should just have their basic needs met and be able to enjoy their lives without benefiting the wealthy, ruling class. That remains an odd notion for most people and that is why so much suffering has been normalized.

When I quit my job because I hated it I had to face the reality that as a person that is not born of privilege, I was going to have to do something in order to afford the lifestyle that I still suffered in. After working upwards of 60 hours a week, barely having time to sit down for real, I still was settling for damn near everything in my life. That realization broke me. It made me realize that if I were going to be forced to struggle and work hard for my life I was going to put that time and energy into striving for a life of fulfillment and dignity. It’s an uphill battle. This has been the longest, fastest, busiest, barely moving year of my life. I have learned a lot, I have realized a lot, and I have unlearned a lot. I continue to try to make the most of my time, but the machine I live in forces me to forfeit at least some of it so that I can have the things that I need and want. 

Things are getting better, but I’m also working to change my relationship to time. Being more mindful of how I spend it and not allowing it to be curated by what other people assert I should do with it is a big part of me feeling better in my living. Being in your 30s is strange, because you’re not old by any stretch of the imagination, but living under a capitalist society as a person of lesser means makes 30 years feel like so many. I am grateful that I have enabled myself the freedom to move in a way that is independent of a lot of the societal norms, but I still struggle to not feel lazy when I take a day off not rooted in making money. It took me years to be indoctrinated into these systems; it’s still work to change my mindset.

Time is not money. You can make more money, you cannot recover your time. As I look down the end of this year, I think about what it all really means and how I want to approach life moving forward so that I can make the most of my time. I do not have the means to totally opt out of the traditional time constructs, but I am working within myself to develop a sense of things that takes the pressure off, while also trying to do as much as I can in terms of exploration and enjoyment before my time on this Earth is complete. I realize that I don’t know what time will be for me once I am no longer in this body, but as long as I am, I want to enable myself to good and end my subscription in the beliefs that I do not deserve good things unless I make somebody else a lot of money just to get a piece to have some peace of mind. I want to move forward with my own constructs of time. We’ll see how that goes. For now I’ll continue to track them as commonly known. I’ll write more about it in the time they call tomorrow…