A Swiss Watch

Your time is your most valuable asset.

How and with whom you spend your time will define your life.

I received this valuable advice just this week, and it was delivered in such a setting that its impact was more memorable than any other self help book or quotes I could have ever come across.

The pressure of time is more stringent on youth. We are constantly being told by wagging wrinkled fingers, not to squander it. To be excellent at a sport, be excellent at school, attend fabulous parties, travel the world, to be disciplined, to be continually “investing” our plentiful energy into everything we possibly can, and we are only adored if we do it fully, earnestly. We are expected to be good at these things, exceptional even. Our high-school teachers told us at our pitiful age of eighteen years old, that we had reached our peak. How old we felt then! But how young we were!

Being stupid is the greatest gift of youth. Intellect before the age of twenty is squandered by one’s hard seed of passionate frenzy, and philosophies take on monumental proportions within a schoolroom, excesses that wild minds run with across fields of innocence. Time was plentiful then, bursting with the honey of our young souls. It stayed aloof, and only ran along clouds to don them with silver linings. We were not supposed to seize it, Time was not ours to claim yet.

Then, one starts to live. The heavy, bulging experience of life itself. We are wide-eyed and rose-colored, and told to pick a path. Maybe they all connect later on, maybe you never get a chance to turn back.

It’s now now now. You have to chose, you have to move, now!

Suddenly, everything is unforgivable. Why aren’t you optimising your time? Why aren’t you using these time hacks to be more efficient? You should know this by now. Why aren’t you doing more? Have you heard of these new time-management schemes? Why aren’t you better? Why are you wasting away, sorry, I meant, why are you wasting your time?

I don’t know.

Being lost is a waste of time.

Going in circles is wrong, standing still is wrong, but we’re paralyzed with fear. How do we know what we want? How can we tell that we’re doing the right thing - and for whom? It’s selfish to only live for oneself by disregarding others, and its unfulfilling to be alone.

I suppose I’m not alone, I have a Swiss watch. Very precise, very reliable. These needles seem to point in a certain direction, that’s very handy indeed. I can just follow two o’clock. Oh no, it’s changed again… There are new people around me. I wonder if there’s a little gadget in here - maybe a stopwatch - that could tell me exactly how much time I should spend with each person I interact with. A measure of their worthiness of each grain of sand slipping away inside me.

I realize I’m crying, and all the while, my feet keep moving.