“If only I had more time!” How often have you said that? More time for work, being with your family, enjoying your hobbies and working on your dreams and goals. And most importantly, more time to live.
The value of Time
How much more time would you buy if it was possible?
Unfortunately, though, time is a commodity that cannot be bought. We all are equipped with the same 86400 seconds each day, not one second more, not one second less. Time is the unquestionable universal leveller.
The powerful and rich have no more time than the lowly and poor and neither the rich nor the poor can accumulate time.
Why is time so important?
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Time is a limited edition commodity, it’s free but its value is priceless. If you think, in life everything can be replaced. People, work, money, friends, material possessions. Even family and health can be replaced but not TIME.
Time is precious, don’t waste it.
The time that me, you and everyone else on this planet have available is limited. Sooner or later we’re going to die so we have the duty and the rights to live the 86400 seconds we have available every day at the best we can. Because when each one of those seconds is gone, they are gone forever.
Time, believe it or not, is the absolute most valuable thing you have in your life!
You can’t recycle wasted time.
Unfortunately, not everyone understands the value of time. The majority (including me for many many years) continue to waste it. Unfortunately, time is the only thing in this world that cannot be recycled and for this reason, as extreme as it sounds, wasting time should be considered a criminal offence.
Time spent with the wrong people, in a job you hate, in abusive relationships. Time spent by trying to change people or complaining about everything without ever doing anything. Wasting time worrying about something that might never happen. Wasting time living in fear and not taking all the actions that you know you must take to have a better life. The list of how we waste our time is endless and sad. A little bit more of awareness could give us a different approach to many things in life.
The big issue
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We produce most of our actions, thoughts and feelings on auto-pilot. The level of awareness of what we do, how we do it and WHY we do it is very little therefore even the power we have over our decisions and choices are limited. My main objective as a life coach is to help people to raise their level of awareness on the things that they do, think and feel – including the way they live their time.
Most of the people I work with, at some point, bring to the table some problems with time management and procrastination issues. They always feel like they are running out of time, often in a constant state of worry and fear that they don’t even know how to explain.
They tend to procrastinate on most of the important things in their lives while hiding the reason why they do so behind the excuse of not having enough time available. “I know I should do XYZ but for some reason, I don’t.” or “I know I should stop/start/change XYZ but for some reasons I don’t”, at my question: “ok, but, what do you think are the reasons why you don’t do XYZ?” more of then than not the answer is: “I don’t know!”
From my experience, both in my personal life and as a life coach, I know now that a very few people genuinely don’t know the reasons why they procrastinate on something. The majority, instead, only pretend of not knowing.
Where do you live?
Your life is simply made by a series of Yesterdays, Todays and Tomorrows. Your past, you present and your future make who you were, who you are and who you will be. Living time consciously, for me, it means first to understand what segment of the timeline you’re mostly living in. In the past, into the present or in the future.
It was found that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day, most of those are the same every day and almost all of them unconsciously produced. If you spend a bit of time consciously thinking about what you think about, you will probably easily find out where you spend most of your lifetime.
Simply put, if you pay close attention to your thoughts, you’ll notice that if you spend your days in a constant state of anxiety, worry and fear, it could mean you’re living your life too much in the future. While your thoughts, actions and feelings are strongly influenced by your negative past.
If this is so, well, welcome to planet earth, where most of the people (including myself for many, many years) live an unhappy and an unfulfilled life!
Your past doesn’t exist!
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word “past” is defined as “something existed or taken place in a period before the present”, if you ask Google, instead, the first definition is: “the past is something that’s gone by in time and no longer existing.”
Now, no matter how you think about your past, it has been left behind. Whether it’s with a nostalgic approach on how good it was and now it’s not so any more or with feelings of shame, regret and sadness for all the mistakes you made – the bottom line is, your past is still your past. Your past is still something that it’s gone, as harsh as it sounds, it, does not exist anymore!
So, if you find yourself doing that, be aware that you’re wasting the precious time you have available for something that cannot be changed, cannot come back, and that cannot, in any shape or form be different!
Your Future doesn’t exist!
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
Now, let’s move forward. If you type on Google “definition of future” you will find out that the future is defined as “something likely to happen or exist at a later time”.
This could be the point of this article is where you might stop reading as I am saying something that can hurt your ego.
No matter who you are, how wealthy or healthy you are, how safe and secure you feel, how young and happy you are or how in control you feel about your life – you can’t predict the future. Nothing and nobody on this planet can predict the future and therefore guarantee you that your future will be exactly as you imagine it.
If you imagine your future life wonderful and prosperous, or full of struggles and pain nobody can guarantee you that what you think is what will be. I’ll tell you more, nobody, including you, can be sure about what will happen in the next five minutes, starting from now!
Look back at the way you lived the past six months. Out of the blue you were forced to lock yourself in your house, possibly far from your loved ones with a new and completely unknown life-threatening virus, which is, by the way, still hunting the most joyful dreams of many millions of people!
So, please, if you find yourself always looking at the future by planning, thinking, worrying about what at the end does not exist, and that nobody can guarantee you that will ever exist, please stop as you’re again wasting some precious time of your life.
What is the value of time in your life?
Personally, I care so much about this topic because I lived most of my adult life stuck into my past, worried about my future.
I was constantly living afraid that my future would be like my ugly past while at the same time I was looking at my good past with a sense of nostalgia and sorrow as not having, being, doing what I once had, been or did a long time before.
What if my tomorrow will be like my bad yesterday? Or what if my happy past will never come back anymore?
I can’t tell you how much I have missed from my life living like that. I have lost happy memories, I have lost love, the possibility to live amazing adventures, and to take life-changing opportunities, I have lost visions, dreams and people that unfortunately won’t come back anymore.
When you live on the wrong side of the timeline when you’re constantly living into a timeframe that does not exist anymore you are not only wasting your time but also your life and everything that is in it.
All that you have is…NOW!
Spend the next minute looking around, wherever you are, it does not matter, just focus on what you see.
Whatever is that you see if you like it or now, it’s all you have. No more no less. Right now, this precise moment is all the life you have. Believe it or not, your past is gone, believe it or not, your future is like gambling at the casino. All that you have and everything you are is right now.
If you think, actions, decisions, choices, behaviours, either good and bad can only be done always and only into the present and it’s in this present moment that your life lies, no yesterday, no tomorrow, but now!
The truth
Many years of struggles helped me to understand a few key truths that I want to share with you today.
Live every second of your life as it is the last one because actually, it could be the last one.
If you have to think about your past, think of it as your best teacher. As a learning tool to use today to create a better version of yourself and to avoid the mistakes, you did yesterday.
If you have to think about your future, think about it from today’s perspective.. Remember that what the decisions and the actions you make today, will shape your tomorrow.
Be always grateful for your present moment, as this precise moment, is the only thing you have complete control over in your life.
Don’t manage your time, live it, and live it now!
Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.
If you want to experience the power of life coaching, this is the right moment to do so!
You can book a free 1-to-1 coaching session with me at
http://thethinkingmind.org/covid19/
Peace,
Antonio
Thank you for this brilliant article, it is exactly what I needed at this moment.