Time is the absolute currency of life. How we perceive and measure quality of life isn't a variable to money, but rather is a function of how rich we experience time. This has been one of the most poignant lessons I had to take in and practise as I moved to Iloilo, and as I have resigned from my job. Both decisions, quite coincidentally, were made in the past year.
The thought of how time is often undervalued, of how the experience of time is the quiet valuation of our lives is a superfluous thought that I will try to explain in the best way I can.
You see, time is the absolute currency of our lives - it is finite, it cannot be multiplied. While money can afford us several possessions at once - we can only spend our time in one space, and in one manner, at a time.
Whether we split our attention to several activities in an hour, we can only experience and expose our senses to one activity each time. While some may argue that they can multitask, we can never place 100% of ourselves everywhere. We just subconsciously shift microseconds of our lives, putting our fleeting attention to what is imminently important. Listen to music while reading a book? Giving attention to kids while working? Listening to a podcast while doing the dishes?
How rich our experience of time is defines the genuine abundance of our lives.
The past decade of my life, I've spent a good deal of my time working. Time cannot be invested, since it does not multiply. But while I've seemingly foolishly exchanged my time for money, I now spend money to make my experience of time richer.
A rich experience of time for me, means being with my family, having a conversation with my child and husband, eating lunch with my family and being able to patiently wait for my husband to cook (without being agitated with work or an impending meeting), being able to spend time with friends, taking a leisurely vacation while being off the grid, learning a new skill... Come to think of it, the space I've made for these things used to be taken up by work.
And how do we make our life feel richer and more abundant?
If we enable ourselves to be the masters of our time. If we empower ourselves to decide how we will spend our time and what deserves our presence. After all, we can only be in one place at a time.
But abundance and richness doesn't have to sound hedonic. It's not always being at home playing with the kids, or always taking that vacation. Abundance is about being present and about the satisfaction of where we are.
It can be in a quiet little farm, or it can otherwise be in that office leading a team. These are both rich experiences, depending on who wants to live them.
Abundance is a full spectrum of how time is experienced. But what it is not, is the burden of the life we desire, but do not live. We are truly rich, if we find ourselves in the dimension we want to be in, and it could be anywhere. We have the same 60 seconds in a minute, 24 hours in a day. What we have differently, is how we experience time. Being filthy rich and spending time worrying about money and being in the hamster wheel of trying to make more is simply a poorer life, versus the next person who has spent time raising his family well, having had vacations in his life, and who has been present in celebrations and relationships that matter.
While we need time to earn money, money is best spent in shaping the way we want to experience time. How deliberate and masterful we spend the quiet currency is the only way we can be satisfied.
