Sunday, August 17, 2008

One Rule

You may
grow
barter
buy
inherit
anything
except
time.

5 comments:

Jason LaPorte said...

I used to think like that.

Kyle said...

Just to be clear, the emphasis is not on what you may acquire (I don't mean to sound haughty -- I was just reading about "Le Caméléon", so the possibilities of persuasion were especially apparent). I just wanted to remind myself that time passes.

What exactly did you used to think? What's changed?

Jason LaPorte said...

Time *does* pass. But making time (and, of course, the point at which your time runs out) a focus of life is like making the Creation the focus of Christianity -- while it's a piece of the puzzle, it's by no means central or vital. It's like the wind -- the pressure you feel on your skin and the movement of leaves on the trees are measurements of an actuality that is deeper and unseeable. Time is like that -- it's one of several visible ways of seeing something deeper.

Let me try answer your question more directly... throughout High School and College, I desperately believed that time was the one resource we could never increase; so I spent every effort to make as efficient use as possible of my time by whatever measurement I found that was relevant -- maximizing my grades, or my appearance to friends, or the feelings of those around me, etc. While that's all well and good, the problem isn't so much the action taken as the reason for it: being a kind person for the sake of efficiency is sort of empty, don't you think?

I don't claim to know what the wind looks like, but I know it's there; there should be a deeper focus and reason than time; one reason may be that focusing on time makes it easy to lose track of what's important; another may be that we don't actually know what our own timers are.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, to me, it would seem that there is a better reason for living than to make the best use of my time.

Kyle said...

Ok, I understand where your're coming from now. I wasn't trying to say "the purpose of life is to make good use of your time", but something much weaker: "you only get so much time." Not even "you only get so much time, don't waste it." or "you only get so much time, spend it wisely." Just: "you only get so much time, remember that -- it's not like other things."

Jason LaPorte said...

Which is, of course, a totally fair thing to say!

I just like to qualify it with, "..., but don't think too much about it, since it isn't all that useful."