Episode 011 - The Gift of Time

This is InBrief. Let's get to it. Hello again and welcome back. This is the InBrief podcast. Each week we take a few minutes to dive into a different topic and hopefully make your transition a little bit easier, but also give you a new perspective and a new challenge to take into a new week. I'm Jordana, the CEO of the Recon Network. This week we're talking about time. So this week, for some reason that is still completely unknown to me, we will once again push our clocks ahead by an hour. And seriously, if you understand why we still do this, please find me on LinkedIn. I would love to know because it is just— it's abandoned me. But regardless of the whys, it's still a common practice. And if you decide to rebel against the cultural norm, you're going to be an hour late for everything starting on Sunday. But I digress. Each year when this happens, you hear the complaints about losing time. But the reality is that most of us will either just sleep through it, or we'll have a few days where things feel a little off, and then we'll get back on track into the rhythm of our longer days. The problem most people have with daylight savings time isn't that hour. It's what that hour means to them. And even though most of us could easily spend an hour zoning out on a TV show or sitting in traffic, that perceived Theft of time hits pretty hard. But why? Why do we have a problem when an outside force takes time from us, but we're okay to waste time all on our own? And before you try to answer that rhetorical question, let's take a quick step back and look at time. So time is one of the few things in this world that is finite. Money, you can always make more or print more. Energy, you can run out, but then it resets. Effort, attitude— these are all things that, at least to a degree, you can control and you can increase or modify. But time— time just moves forward steadily. It doesn't care if you're wasting it or cherishing it. It doesn't care who you are or how much money you have or how much property you have or what your rank is or who your mom is. Time treats us all equally, doling out a minute every 60 seconds. We spend those minutes as we wish, either investing them or wasting them on everything from work to self-care to relationships, religion, depression, motivation, planning, reacting. And when the time's up, it's up. You can't buy more hours in a week, and you can't negotiate for more years here on Earth. Time is what it is, and because of its immovable, fixed nature, it demands respect. There's a Buddhist saying, the problem is you think you have time. I keep it on my desk, and I put it there after a moment in my past when I thought I had lost someone that was very important to me. See, I didn't respect the time I had, and I took it for granted, and I almost forfeited everything. I'm fortunate in that it turned around for the better, but from that moment on, I realized how true the statement is. We think we We have time. We may or may not. We think we can spend time with that person later when things aren't so busy. We think we can chase our dreams later when the kids are grown or when we have more money. We think that time is infinite and it will allow us to catch up with it when our priorities change. But I hate to tell you, that's not how it works. So as always, I have a challenge for you this week. Look at your time. Are you spending it in harmony with your true priorities? Are you dedicating hours to those most important people in your life? Are you making time for your dreams and goals? And if not, when will you? And more importantly, will time be gracious to you when you finally decide to make the shift? None of us are promised tomorrow, and many of us are wasting today. Don't let your biggest regret in life be the time you thought you had, but didn't.