On Spending Time
Dear Lena,
You mentioned that you’re frustrated, even horrified, with yourself for the amount of time you spend lounging around in bed when you wake up and how much time you suspect yourself of wasting generally. I find your frustration both ill and well formed, based on how well I know you, and would caution that you have a little more patience with yourself.
On the one hand, I know you better: You’re quite the industrious person. I don’t know anyone else who is as fastidious as you are with one’s schedule, projects, and passions, despite at times fallings short of the aim. I also happen to know that you almost always aim too high (in a way that leads me to believe that it’s intentional on your part) and so am surprised when you’re surprised—or, worse, frustrated—that you sometimes happen to miss the mark. In less words, you’re expecting too much of yourself, and it’s no wonder you find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning: You’re exhausted. We can write about this sometime, your tendency to overdo yourself. For now I only wish to caution patience, but also self-compassion.
On the other hand, I can’t help but admiring your frustration with yourself, since it betrays your understanding of how precious time is. Time is the only universal currency, which all barter and exchange with; we all are born with an allotment; the catch is that none of us knows how much we have to our name. All we can do is continue extracting it from our purse until the day our fingertips stroke bare thread.
I believe what I’ve just written is a fairly obvious fact, and yet it surprises me just how thriftless we can be with our time. We spend it arbitrarily, wastefully, even, tossing it this way and that, on the most trivial of experiences. Seneca says it best, writing to his friend Lucilius, and because I’m in favor of saving my time, I’ll simply share what he wrote to his own friend. He writes,
What fools these mortal be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity—time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot replay. [1]
Yet maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since we constantly overesteem our capacities as humans. we’re not as farsighted as we would pretend to be, which may explain why we’re so apt to fritter away our time—a little here, a little there—without seeing the long-term consequences of such wastefulness. As Thoreau said, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” [2]
The upshot, Lena, is that you recognize where you may be falling short, and recognition is the first step of moral progress. The irony with slothfulness is that it mimics death, in posture and inaction, both of which we shall master in death proper. So does sleeping. It makes sense, then, that you’d find your alleged slothfulness horrifying. It is, in so many ways, deadly. But the solution is not to wear your spirit down with overactivity, since this too merely brings you closer to the inevitable. Instead, practice consistency—and, in your case, self-compassion. Yes, recognize the absolute truth of your final destination and the inscrutable path you’re taking to get there, but don’t do so at the expense of your life.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, trans. Richard Mott Gummere (Dover, 2016), 1.
- Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. William L. Howarth (Princeton University Press, 1971), 8.
