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I don’t have five seconds to spare!
Is this what it’s come down to? I have to ask myself as I read a study suggesting that we, internet dwellers, tend to abandon downloading a file if it’s taking more than five seconds. Five seconds! Quack, I remember having to walk 15 minutes to my aunt C’s home to consult her Encyclopedia Britannica just to finish my homework. OK this makes me old, but it also tells me that if these days I don’t have five seconds to spare, there is something wrong with the way I’m living my life.
Why do we feel rushed? Why are we so busy? We got services and technologies to help us expedite almost anything from laundry to cooking. Our technology is so advanced that we can almost instantly share documents, videos and pictures with anyone around the world.
So here is a truth, it isn’t about having less time, but how we perceive and use time.
This quote from Albert Einstein illustrates the issue “an hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
Perception is everything.
We’ve been taught that time is money, a fair equation considering that most of us get paid by the hour. However in doing so we’ve also brought all our money issues and make them time issues. How we use it, waste it, save it these are the thoughts that pollute our enjoyment of time.
Life is long if we know how to use it.
If we’re constantly thinking about the scarcity of time, well, we’ll have a hard time finding time. So here is another truth, time isn’t money, it’s nothing more than the space between events.
This is my proposal for Spring cleaning, let’s invest time in those things that make us feel good. Let’s dust off all those I-don’t-have-time excuses, we got time. Let’s pack away multitasking, we know that when we do one thing at a time, it gets done way faster and we have way more fun. And let’s clean up our expectations of what we can get done in a day.
We’re going to look for abundance and we’re going to find her.
As for the rest of the Spring Cleaning, we have a long life to get to it or as De Gracia wrote in 1965 “Lean back under a tree, put your arms behind your head, smile and remember that the beginnings and ends of man’s every great enterprise are untidy.”
