The Rolling Stones were wrong.

So originally I was going to title this blog with a question, but posed in the way Jerry Seinfield would have asked it…but then I realized how dumb that is because then it just sounds like a question and there’s no way to convey his unique voice and body movements into a line of text….so new title! (In case you were wondering, it was originally going to be “So what’s with all these deadlines?” which really didn’t fit how the blog developed anyways.)

Anyways! Our planet is full of resources. While some of those resources don’t have unlimited or renewable sources (I’m looking at you, oil), others are fixed in nature without being depleted no matter how we use them (think hydrologic or water cycle (sorry, California!)), and finally other resources are available in vast quantities but without our own intervention or controls, could be depleted and gone (like trees). Today I’m going to specifically address one of those finite, only able to use once resources; time.

While time itself is unlimited in nature, our use and observance of it is not. We will only live a finite amount of years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds in life and unless the secret to the fountain of youth is discovered, nothing can change that. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the oldest person to have ever lived as a woman in France who died in 1997 at age 122 years and 164 days. While researching this, I found another story of a man who turned 123 living in Bolivia written and vetted by the Associated Press in 2013, but at that point you’re just splitting hairs. The concept of anyone alive today being born in the 1800’s is almost too grand of a concept to grasp, for me at least.

When we are young, it feels like we have nothing but time. We can spend time, waste time, use time wisely or poorly, and have years of time to look forward to. Time can seem to crawl or fly by, or if I was in school, even stand still. Now that I’m older, time moves too quickly, years pass too swiftly and each second feels like a drumbeat sounding cadence. Watching my children go from toddlers to teenagers in the blink of an eye can leave me misty-eyed and gasping if I think about it too hard.

The work we do, regardless of what that is, also revolves around time. It takes time for investments to mature, time for work output to create the performance expected and the hours we spend doing our work in a day are hours we will never have again to do anything else. As a fixed personal resource, we don’t really pay attention to how we spend it or what we do with it, but shouldn’t we? Our grandparents used to all tell us things like to use our time wisely or that youth is wasted on the young. We didn’t know or care what they meant, but as we age the weight and gravity beings to set in.

There are many variations to the following quote: Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. That quote has been attributed to everyone from Confucius to Mark Twain to Marc Anthony and even a professor at Princeton named Arthur Szathmary. We all want whats best for us and our families, but we shouldn’t be miserable trying to accomplish that. Find a job you love to do and spend the limited time you have doing the things you love to do. Hike a mountain! Fly a Kite! Ride a Seal! Swim with sharks! (some of these things may limit the time you have) but do everything you can to just live your life to the fullest extent you can, whatever that looks like to you.

So I repeat: The Rolling Stones were wrong, time is most definitely NOT on our side. But we can use the time we have doing the things we love to do.

Justin Huereña Staff Blogger

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