Ticking Away

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
Sun is the same, in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

– “Time” by Pink Floyd

Time itself is an illusion. It’s a construct which allows us to measure our successes, failures or efficiencies. Time even sets standards for comparisons – such as athletic sports and auto racing.

I believe our obsession with time is one of the key components to our overall unhappiness. We crave instant gratification. We want what we want when we want it. Taking the time to slow down and enjoy things feels like it has become more of an inconvenience instead of an opportunity. Online shopping, dating, streaming – express lanes that sidestep the human experience for convenience.

When it comes to the management of time for our ourselves, how well do we actually perform? How often do we say we don’t have time to do something, when in fact it’s not that we don’t have time, it’s that we choose to do something else which chips away at our availability.

No matter how much we have available, we never seem to have enough of it.

Instead of speeding up work and chores in order to enjoy other personal aspects of our lives, we use what would have been free time to add more distractions and stress. We lie to ourselves and make excuses for time until we can no longer hold the weight and it all comes crashing down.

I’d rather have 100 years of quality experience than 1,000 years of aimless existence.

To take time to do something feels as though it will eventually be reduced to a subject future generations will learn about and not be able to comprehend – once the information is uploaded into the chips they have implanted in their heads that way they have instant access and no longer need to waste time studying.