Life may be short, but it’s shorter when time is wasted.
The average person will live to the age of 78.6 years old. That’s about 28,689 days in a lifetime. How those days (and the hours and minutes they’re comprised of) are spent will largely determine whether and how many regrets one has.
The activities, people, things, thoughts, priorities, and affiliations that demand our attention consume our time. While — like everything in life — some of that is out of our control, most of our time is our own to do with as we see fit. The term “spending time” is an apt one because we are depleting a finite resource with each passing moment. We cannot get time back or make more of it. In fact, none of us actually knows for certain how much of it we have. That’s why, in my symphonic life view, time cannot be saved. It can only be spent.
While life may be short, it can be plentiful if you know how to use life’s time as well as your personal BPM. Your BPM refers to the way you choose to pace the rhythm of your life. Some people can handle a higher or lower pace. We all have a unique BPM and that can change throughout the course of a lifetime. Your life’s rhythm depends on you and which quarter of life you’re in. I refer to quarters in life because, in my personal view, life is like a hockey game. There are three periods and (if you’re lucky) bonus overtime.
For most of us, by the time we enter our mid-60s, we tend to not value time until it’s too late. I say that starts in the mid-60s as opposed to any other time in life because in the mid-60s you have fewer tomorrows than you do yesterdays, both statistically and financially. Things are set financially that determine the quality of your life by that time in everyone’s life. That’s why in the mid-to-late 60s there is a forced life realization of measurement of one’s time, whether attention is paid or unpaid. It’s an unfortunate attention getter that focuses that individual by what is illogically deemed as “by surprise,” but it’s not a surprise by any means. It’s simply a lack of thought process and the humility to set clear and meaningful goals in one’s life. That starts in one’s teens and early 20s. After 40-plus years, that is factually not a surprise despite popular belief. This is the case for most people not because of the lack of capability but (as I do and have always believed) because every single person has a dominant level of ability inside them that they simply have to be introspective enough to access. It is the lack of awareness of time that is the Achilles heel of us all. Hence, time is wasted. It’s not that any one particular person is better than another. Some simply pay attention to time and most don’t. There is no in-between.
If you only had one bottle of water to last a week, you wouldn’t waste it on frivolous things. You’d conserve it and make it last as long as possible. You’d alter your actions so that you would require as little water as possible to make it last longer. You would only use it for the most important people and things in your life. You’d likely set up a system to collect water wherever possible so that you had what you needed and were less likely to go without. If you didn’t do those things, you couldn’t claim to be surprised when you became thirsty and had too little water left. Time is no different.
Worry, drama, unfruitful relationships, mindless behaviors, egoic pursuits without purpose, comparison, self-harm — all of these detract from time in a predictably regrettable manner. By having an awareness of these things and choosing instead to prioritize high-value activities, people, thoughts, and actions, the quality of one’s time comes into alignment with its value. This, in my view, is the key to life’s lock of regret.
