The other gift of time

The feeling of scarcity about time is very strange. If we look at it from a distance, it is obvious that everyone has 24 hours each day, not more, not less. But scarcity arises from the relative difference in abundance between the number of things to be accomplished and the amount of time available. It is just like an old house: it does not matter how big it is, you can always make it feel crammed if you put enough things inside. One of the trickiest problems in managing your time is the question of how much of the "necessary" actually is: do I really need to sleep eight hours every day or can I get by with only six and the rest is it just squandering? And then comes everything truly unavoidable, like work, toilet breaks, commute time, etc. That is why, as I mentioned before, having someone else's time at your disposal is a true gift: you do not get to have more time yourself, but you can delegate some of the tasks and alleviate your schedule pressure.

But today I wanted to talk about a different type of time gift, one that does not involve someone else's time but our own. This is the kind of gift that happens when someone (or just the circumstances) makes us aware of the value of our time, of its limitation (not necessarily its scarcity) and the importance of actually making headway in the matters that we care about, because, if we keep postponing them, we might run out of time before we accomplish our goals.

Photo: asenat29

One premium example of this change of priorities is what happened with the COVID-related lockdowns: they forced us to renounce many of our regular tasks, releasing a lot of time pressure, and once the restrictions were lifted we realized that we did not really care that much about many of the lost activities. But there is another instance where the impact is even bigger.

In the last few months I have accidentally ran into several stories (some were real, some were fiction) where one of the characters was informed of a terminal disease. Let me start by saying that this is an undisputed setback for anyone: we all know we are going to die, but generally prefer not to look at the matter too closely and live as if we were essentially to live forever. So when we suddenly get our seemingly endless reservoir of hours cut back to just a few months the shock is unavoidable. There is, though, a silver lining: a terminal disease gives you at least some time to cope with it, a situation much better than sudden death, which intrinsically leaves all your issues unfinished.

The gift in this tragedy is that knowing that the time really is in short supply helps us weed out all the irrelevant activities and focus on the essential. In fact it is almost a narrative trope that cancer patients try to complete their "bucket list" once they get diagnosed (just look at the acclaimed 2007 American movie "The Bucket List" with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman). However there is also the opposite reaction, where the patient tries to get their things in order but does otherwise nothing out of the ordinary, to the point (or with the intention) that no one around them becomes aware of the upcoming events. Does the afflicted have the right to hide their condition from their friends and family? I contend that this is not the case, but let me explain why.

As I mentioned before, being informed that one has some months to live immediately poses the question of how to tell our loved ones: if we do not tell them, our eventual death will come unexpectedly for them, causing a great shock; furthermore, they will notice that they had been lied to for months, which adds to the grief; finally, they will also realize that we have been suffering in silence all this time, and the regret for all the support that was never given can be overwhelming. Admittedly, there is a certain risk that our acquaintances will change the way they treat us, with pity or endless caution, as if we were already dead, but I believe that this attitude can be dispelled relatively easily if we manage to convey the idea that we are still alive and trying to enjoy the available time as much as possible.

Imposing a sudden tragedy onto our loved ones when we could have announced it months earlier is, in my view, an inexcusable exercise of selfishness. If we have been granted a period of mercy, albeit short, it is only natural that we distribute this gift on to our family and friends so that they too have a chance to get their things in order, particularly those issues that have something to do with us. Don't you agree?

That said, I would like to clarify that I am not, as far as I know, terminally ill. And yet, when you are about to reach 50 years of age it is not easy to keep thinking that you have all your life ahead of yourself. Enjoy your weekend.