They are everywhere… Countdowns, clocks and timers doing their relentless enumerations… Counting backward from some arbitrary number to indicate the time remaining before some random event or some chronometer with that chosen time where you have to be somewhere as you race in your car hoping to beat the clock.. Tick, tock, tick, tock… Every day is countdown to bedtime, every week is a countdown to the weekend, every month is a countdown to your birthday and every year marks the time until your demise… Hello, and welcome to the rest of your life… Quit wasting it but for the love of god stop feeling bad about it... It's really not your fault, but you can still do something about it...
I am sure that you have heard that there are 86,400 seconds in a day and that’s quite a long time… Just to put that in perspective, if you were to count to 86,400 that would take you all day long… That would be one helluva day wouldn’t it? I would kinda like to give it a try, you know, just to say I did it…
Now, I know 86,400 feels like a long time but stick with me for a second, let’s do some math… Yeah I know some people just glazed over like a Crispy Crème Donut but hang with me… Skip a paragraph or six if you feel a seizure coming on but we are going to put this stupid, useless, “motivational” guilt causing nonsense to rest…
Using myself as an example and then starting at midnight… I sleep until 0500 so we lose 18,000 seconds… Now I know we aren’t “losing them, because sleep is in the top five necessary things that promote health and wellness. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re hobbling your progress… In fact, it is impossible to be holistically healthy without proper rest periods… What we am talking about is the time you actually have in a day to be actively pursuing your goals…
So 86,400 minus 18,000 leaves us 68,400 seconds… Not bad but you have to consider sleep again at the end of the day… I go to bed at 2200 hours (10:00 PM) so take off another 7,200 seconds and the window of opportunity open to pursue your goals drops to 61,200 seconds. Still looking pretty good, but we do have to work… Now to save time I am going to add up work, getting ready for work, commuting to and from work and stopping by the store on the way home from work and call it 10 hours… Now we subtract 36,000 seconds… Wow… That leaves us with 25,200 seconds…
Dinner, clean up and my after work, pandemic world shower… 1.5 hours… Subtract 5,400 and you are left with 19,800 seconds… The glittery world of motivational memes is such bullshit… They happily scold us that we have 86,400 seconds in a day!!! Oh my, what should I do with all my time? Good golly, I’m wasting my life… Not really folks, life isn’t the happy motivational place the internet would lead us think and instead we feel guilty that we are not experiencing it properly… It’s hard…
But wait… You still have 5.5 hours that belong to you… Parents of young children are excused and you have my condolences… Your lives are filled from eyes open to eyes shut and if you get to do anything it costs you money for a babysitter and you just worry the entire time you’re gone… Sorry about that…
For the rest of you lucky people, you have 5.5 hours almost every day… You don’t have much time so sitting in a chair watching television is not the way to spend it… The cycle of being tired can be not just broken, but shattered, swept up and erased… The reason you’re so tired is that you’re out of shape. Sounds counterintuitive but it’s true… When you have energy and you expend that energy and that gives you more energy… When you have no energy and you exert none, you just have no energy…
Back to those 5.5 hours… Let me tell you about mine… For starters, I write this blog for about 30 minutes in the morning and finish it during my lunch so it only takes 30 minutes out of my 5.5 hours… I’m left with five…. I exercise daily for 1.5 hours like it’s my religion… Sick, tired, angry, happy, whatever, it doesn’t matter; this body knows better than to try for an excuse… 3.5 hours left… I practice guitar for an average of a half hour daily , ranging from 15 to 45 minutes depending on how I sound that day because NO ONE, including myself wants to listen to really bad music… I think sometimes the spirit of a musician enters my body through one of those channeling things and other times, I am possessed by a chimpanzee… I always spend at least 15 minutes even when it’s the chimp banging uselessly on the strings… I’m going to take away another 1.5 hours because there is always some pain in the ass little job, the writing takes too long, I fuck around during exercise, or something else like a stop at the store, fix the truck, wax a floor nonsense to rob me of some of my time… So that leaves me 1.5 hours per day on average to spend freely… When people exhaustedly tell me that “they don’t have the time for self care or exercise I kinda have to wonder what the fuck they’re doing… Structure is available to all of us but structure is not enough… Mostly, it’s about discipline and I have blogged about that cursed word before… Expect some more in the future...
You can push back if you want, I don’t mind… The modern age has taken up so much of our time that it feels overwhelming to think about time for you, time for exercise, etc… On top of that, our culture makes us feel guilty for personal time… In most jobs you have to feel bad for taking a personal day, a sick day or a vacation… Luckily I don’t work there… I hear a lot that jobs have to be brought home and that’s wrong but we can talk about that later…
So the next time you see some meme on Facebook or Instagram that’s says you have 86,400 seconds in a day, feel perfectly satisfied to view that notion as bullshit… You got about 90 minutes if you’re highly motivated, disciplined and organized… And seriously, every now and then, not a lot, don’t be greedy, just hit the snooze button… If the last forty days have taught me anything, the snooze button is the thing I miss the most and as soon as this 90 Day Life Change Challenge is over, I’m going to waste an entire day…
See you tomorrow, because I have no choice in the manner…
Love you a lot…
Now go get organized like your life depended on it, because it does…
The 90 Day Life Change Challenge update… Same as yesterday… I cannot believe the life changes… Oh shit, wait a second, IT’S WORKING!!!!!
One other thing… What do I do with those 90 minutes every day…. Well… To tell you the truth, I do evil shit… Have a great day…
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