Terminable Time

Our human ability to project into the future far better than most critters is both a boon and a burden; the difficulty is that we know that someday we will die. Even though we seldom are inclined to acknowledge it, every one of us is conscious of this fact. Our time in this existence is restricted… one might even say very short. Compared to a tree, we’re here quickly and then gone. Compared to a mountain, we’re not even the blink of an eye.

Animals are less likely to suffer from the curse of knowing they have only so much time, so they happily and blissfully live in the moment, not worrying about it. We humans have certain advantages over our fellow creatures (say, sipping a nice cabernet wine) but our curse, the source of so much of our angst, is the foreknowledge that we will soon be gone. So there’s a deep understanding at the core of every human that time is precious, more so than gold, although this is seldom a conscious response.

Many of us try to use our limited time by obsessively filling every waking moment with furious activity. Modern technology allows us to accomplish a particular feat that required a dozen of our ancestors. So we multitask! A contemporary farmer on his own can tend to hundreds of acres with his machines, which enables him to plow while he texts! The business world esteems productivity and strives to drive efficiency ever higher—drawing evermore lifeblood out of employees.

Many of us understand that money and time are, in some ways, interchangeable. For example, I noted years ago that, having chosen to live a low-income lifestyle, I had to invest a lot more time in daily chores. Many people earn lots of money in order to be able to buy the time of others to do their mundane tasks, while they carve out time to ski or go sailing. Leisure time can be very pricey!

We thus are likely to adopt the belief that the more money we have, the more time we’ll have. That’s a false lure, however. Yes, there seems to be virtually no limit to the amount of money one may accumulate, but that’s where the addictive draw of material things comes in. When is enough, enough? Our insatiable desires can never be slaked. But if we pause and honestly look at ourselves, we can quickly see that, although time and money seem interchangeable, there is a limit to the amount of time we have. We may become a billionaire, but can’t become immortal.

Thus, many people ironically and paradoxically (even tragically) allow precious time to be wasted, even when they are fervently trying to hoard it. While their attention is diverted by making more money, their time slips away. Another irony of the human condition is that poor people often have more time than the rich—if only because they can devote more attention to it. More often than not, a poor person is more generous with her time than a wealthy one.

One of the salient paradoxes of the human condition is that, like love, we can enjoy our time so much more when we give it away. Both time and love are priceless, and yet when we freely mete them out to others, we discover that we can come to appreciate them more than we ever would if we try to hoard them. It’s not that we find others returning love or time to us in abundance (although this can happen); it’s that we really come to appreciate every moment and every gesture of love that we share. It’s a sacred contradiction: to get something truly precious, you must give it away.