We All Have Enough Time
But only if we reimagine it
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” — Lucius Seneca
Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Foundation, had the unthinkable opportunity of reading his own obituary while alive. In 1888, a French newspaper ran an obituary titled “The Merchant of Death is dead,” which condemned Alfred’s inventions of explosives that had killed and maimed innocent people.
The newspaper didn’t know that the deceased person was not Alfred himself, but his brother Ludwig. Nevertheless, horrified by what he read about himself, he decided to drastically reinvent his life’s legacy. He donated almost his entire wealth to set up the Nobel Foundation to promote world peace and reward humanistic causes.
After reading the story behind the Nobel Prize, I see why some people promote the “imagine your funeral” exercise, which I’ve often ignored. Most of us lead lives that are not in dire need of drastic makeovers. However, we all can benefit from reimagining our relationship with time and the way we see it.
“How did it get so late so soon?” — Dr. Seuss
Meditating on time and its finitude has become one of my obsessions in recent years, and the pandemic has only deepened it. After working from home for months, I’ve begun to lose all sense of time. I can’t tell anymore which day is which without glancing at the calendar.
Day becomes night and night becomes day in the blink of an eye. It freaks me out when I imagine my life ebbing away like water out of a broken faucet. I wish time would stop fooling with me, but I know it is hopeless to plead with it. Time never waits. It has no mercy.
The passage of time is hard to ignore. Every so often I notice my son has grown a half inch taller. It gives me joy but also shivers.
Devices that help us pass time also steal it from us. Technology can imprison us indoors, working in vain. Outside I hear an ambulance racing to save someone’s life. I am racing to punch numbers into the computer so that some vendors and employees get paid on time.
Time doesn’t care where I do what I do. It only asks why.
I recently read about the top five regrets of dying:
1. I wish I had the courage to live life true to myself. 2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. 3. I wish I had the courage to express myself. 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 5. I wish I had let myself be happier.
I am asking myself: If I am not dying yet — I am healthy and still have decades to live, if all goes well — then how come I already have all of these regrets?
I’ve tried molding myself to meet the expectations of others. I’ve lost years chasing endeavors wrong for me. I’ve lost touch with good friends. I’ve been afraid of expressing myself. I’ve felt miserable when I could’ve been happier.
Check check check. What can I do now to make amends?
“Time is an illusion.” — Albert Einstein
I often run into the advice, “Live your everyday life as if it is your last day.” Despite my exaggerated sensitivity to time, I find this a bit too dramatic. To me, while it lasts and however long it lasts, life is meant to be lived, appreciated, and celebrated without fearing death.
Perhaps, if death isn’t meant to be feared, then neither is time. I get it, though. Proponents of the “Imagine your funeral” exercise try to help us focus on what matters in life and to use our limited time wisely.
What matters for me now is to love to the fullest of my potential. That is it. I just don’t want to run out of time to love all that I could love in life.
I saw a Facebook post by a mom who told her son, “I’ve loved you for 3,000 days.” Her son and my son are the same age, so now I know how many days I’ve loved my son so far, too. I’ve never before thought of this in a measurement of days. I remind myself to focus on each day as best as I can because we live and love only one day at a time.
The Chinese artist-in-exile Ai Wei Wei writes:
“Time can restart and begin anew, or it can hide entirely, get cut off, disappear. Time is more than what passes between this moment and another one, or the price required to finish a task. It seeds our imagination, and slows down when we’re creatively absorbed. It spurs action, and is bound up with how we press forward with life and with our resolve to make ourselves complete.”
I agree with his sentiment. What we call time is more than a way to measure the rotations of the earth and the cycling of seasons. It is certainly not merely the units of life between tasks. We can’t put a price on it, though we always try. Time lives and dies in our imagination. We are not so powerless before it.
We all have enough time if we reimagine how we see it and make of it what we can. That is a cause for celebration.
