Bookmark #670

Maybe these words are pedestrian. Maybe anyone can write better or more profoundly, and perhaps, I am wasting my time. But even if all that was true, what else would I do with the time? Eventually, we must all do something. Writing these words and trying to earn a living so I can continue doing so takes most of my time and days. It blows my mind when someone I meet tells me novel, more irritating ways of saving more time. What do you do with all the time you save? I often ask them, and more often than not, it is the first time they come face-to-face with this question.

Humanity has spent centuries trying to save time, but we are busier than ever. Even if you meet someone who successfully saves enough of it, they rarely have anything to show for all the hours they saved. It almost makes me think that we are not meant to save it, only find the things we would happily spend our hours doing, and if happiness is too lofty an intention, then necessity.

The world works with some rules, such as earning a living, as ludicrous as that phrase sounds. A cat does not have to worry about it, but we must, so we use the time for that. A cat takes a nap on the curb because it has no bills to pay. I have little to say about why we do, and neither do I feel it is my place to say any of it, but now that we have the bills to pay and the life to live, we must. The circumstances we fall in are rarely in our control, but we can do our best. That is how I live, so I don’t want to save seconds. I believe I want to spend every waking hour doing things, not for a goal but because of a simple question: if not this, then what?

It is funny that all the people who tell me their tricks for saving time rarely have enough of it to take a walk, grab a cup of coffee, watch a film, or even sit quietly. It is almost as if they are their own enemies. I do not share this ambition, and I seem to have an awful lot of time on my hands. Frankly, too much of it since they keep asking me: how do you get the time to write every day? And I tell them: I don’t know.

If anything, I have always found a day to be incredibly long. I keep trying to fill it with tasks, but some of it is always left to spare.

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