The Flying Engine of Time
I decided to spend the afternoon with a cool pint of beer at one of the neighbourhood restaurants. I'll order some food (which will be my second and last meal of the day) and try to think of some subject to write.
It's a hot afternoon and the beer feels very refreshing. Tomorrow is the beginning of Ramadan and the start of the fasting month for Muslims all over the world. We Malaysians live from one religious celebration to the next. Already this year we had the Chinese Lunar New Year and the Hindu Thaipusam. And at some point, someone will inevitably comment how time flies.
Yes, it does feel like each year passes with such rapidity. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, it means that we are living free; we are not sitting in a prison somewhere staring at the 4 walls where time would be crawling by at a snail's pace. Being able to lament how time flies is a privilege, which we should all be grateful for.
But why do we always feel that we are short of time? We always feel that work takes up a big chunk of it when we should be spending more quality time with our loved ones. What is this so-called 'quality time'? Is it simply time that we spend doing things we like and enjoy? Or is it time we spend, building towards a better future for ourselves?
One thing is for certain though: each one of us is given the 24 hours a day to spend. Some choose to spend them wisely by allowing it to compound interests, some choose to kill it. Who is the wiser one? Do not underestimate the accumulative power of time--a blog topic I wrote more than 20 years ago!
At that time I did not know that one day I could feed all my blog articles into an LLM and pose questions to myself! My blog has become a virtual me because it has captured so many of my thoughts.
Time is energy. If you don't use it, it'll be lost like heat. To put this energy to productive use, you start by building an engine--read The Piston of Time. Once you have that mechanism in place, time will automatically generate the output that you value. And this value also compounds over time. That is my definition of quality time.
Time also feels swift because our temporal granularity is too coarse. We simply swipe forward from one significant event to another, always looking towards the next: 15 more minutes before my shift ends, 2 more days to the weekend, payday soon, gathering again coming Christmas...
Why pay less importance to the time in between? These odds and ends, discarded fragments of time can be given more importance. We can assign a micro-task to each of these small fragments of time and immediately you will see how they coalesce together to create value. You have 12 minutes to kill before the next meeting? Read a sonnet, or an aphorism by Nietszsche, or a verse from the Bible. Meditate upon it. Let me germinate in your mind. You'll be surprised how far they will take you.
Yes, I agree. Time flies. But therein lies our source of power. You just have to harness it and it'll take you places.
