“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time” – Jim Rohn

As one stage in life ends and another begins, you will think about how fleeting time is. It will occur to you that there are things you could have done, that will have made the present moment more valuable, but you will choose to ignore these thoughts. Instead, you will learn to adapt to whatever situation you find yourself in and accept it as your destiny. Until one day – perhaps you don’t. But until that moment arrives, your decision will have been dangerously postponed – a pending response to time will tell may be delayed indefinitely.

Lazy Thinking

Boredom is unforgivable. There are so many things to do, learn, create, and explore. Boredom is a symptom of parasitic, lazy thinking. If there were times in your life when all you wanted to do was pause time, so you can get more done, you were living properly. Unfortunately, most of you will tend to experience that because of externally imposed deadlines by your employers or academic institutions. But imagine living in a way that never took time for granted, and always wishing for extra hours in the day to help you dedicate yourself completely to your work and passions? How do you think your experience of life would be different?

And if you find that possibility too difficult to entertain, have you wondered why? Could it be that you have chosen to settle for a mediocre life instead of living up to your potential? That you have substituted what matters most to you for doing what matters most to other people? Or that you never got around to figuring out what your values were? 

When you can’t wait for your timer to wind down and signal permission for you to finally open your microwave door, or when you are staring intently at the flashing red traffic light, anxiously pressing your hands against the steering wheel, eagerly waiting for green, are you living properly? What about when you decided to program your body to check the status of your flight in five-minute intervals for an entire hour, or when you scribbled despondently on your notepad during a boring lecture, or stared into space with eyes unfocused and still, as you vaguely heard the murmurs of the pointless conversations taking place in the background?

“We see the world not as it is, but as we are” – Stephen Covey

Nature’s Feedback Mechanism

Time moves slowly when you are frustrated and out of flow. It’s as if your mind is telling you that whatever you are doing isn’t worth your full attention and effort. Conversely, when you experience flow and are completely immersed in an activity, thoughts about time cease to exist. The relationship your mind has with time is the no-bullshit, best friend, trusted confidant kind where feedback is direct and brutal.

You never wonder whether you are bored. You either are or aren’t. And you never wonder whether you are having fun. But somewhere along the way, you decided that it was okay to not spend your time having fun. You convinced yourself that maybe it would be worth it to live a life of doing chores for other people so that you can drown your consciousness in alcohol come the weekend.

Nature’s feedback mechanism tells you what you should be doing with your time. Whenever you don’t feel yourself completely engaged in what you are doing, then it’s the wrong thing. And this isn’t to say that your life should never comprise of things that don’t engage you – as important executive and maintenance functions are probably boring, but that doesn’t mean you should spend the bulk of your time on those things.

Embracing Boredom

The problem is that you have tried to cure boredom the wrong way. Binge watching reality TV shows and playing the latest war-mind-battle-craft game isn’t how you should deal with boredom (if you don’t want to come to regret it later).

Embracing boredom through mindfulness is a smarter strategy. When you feel bored, you are forced to think of a better way of spending your time in the future.

Time will tell whether you have made the right choice – whether to cure boredom with purposeful planning, or through more mindless distraction. And as with all important choices, the results are never in immediately, but will only reveal themselves in the long run.

Your indecision may also be a pending response to time will tell, but if you really wanted to know what time would eventually come to tell, your response can no longer be delayed, it must be made now.