The Art of Valuing Wasted Time

You are going to run out of time.

In today’s day and age, it’s so easy to get caught up in scheduling and missing important pivotal life moments. With Instagram and Facebook and trying to get the perfect image, we too often fail to be a part of the moment we are trying so desperately to capture. We hear the word last in so much advertising; LAST CHANCE FOR THIS DEAL and THIS IS THE LAST COMMODITY YOU’LL EVER NEED when we end up being ‘last’ in the artificial race we have created. We spend so much time trying to fill our time that we spend time filling time opposed to using it. Then, when we grow older we reflect our life and try to gain more time to do everything we simply forgot to or were unable to do when we lacked finances, stability, education…the list goes on and on.

Children are encouraged from a young age to be productive and to not procrastinate, without being allowed to discover the value in procrastination and all the other discoveries and different sorts of productivity that live in this realm of being. Would my parents ever understand that if I didn’t ‘waste time’ on music and writing and Facebook that I really wouldn’t be the same person? That maybe for better or for worse, my flaws are the canyons that border my river of life and personality? That by punishing me by taking away my going out privileges and accusing me of being changed because of who I go out with, you actually aren’t preventing me from getting mixed up in all the wrong things? Is it that my rebellious and stubborn nature directs me down the same path regardless of complications, or is it that teachers and parents approach things in an out-of-date or ineffective way, simply because it’s what’s always been done?

A couple of years ago, I was stuck on an English project. It was due the next day and I had not begun. My partner was out of town and I was fairly certain I would receive an extension if I showed my teacher that I had at least tried. I pulled up a blank Word document and proceeded to write the first words I could think of. “I really really really really really really don’t want to do this right now. Why would my teacher want a presentation like this….alsdfja;slkfjl;kasf;ljas;jsa;j” You get the idea. The project wasn’t coming. I clicked on a different tab and opened up rhymezone, just out of the blue. I wrote a simple phrase from a song I had heard on the radio that morning and typed the last word of the line into rhymezone.

I wrote my first poem that day. Not something I was taught or forced into my schedule, but a sliver of wasted time that would come to change the rest of my life through its subtle and artistic ways. This is the reason I call into question: what gives time value? Is it how it makes us feel? Is it what we can do if we are efficient? And I guess this question may hold a realm of different answers for different people.

In the words of William Faulkner in his book The Sound and the Fury, he writes, “I gave [a watch] to you not so that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

Be yourself in everything you do, be productive but know when to take your break, when to sing your song, watch a Youtube video or to write your poem. Because it’s those choices that make you YOU, not the endless school assignments and paychecks for your 9-5 days. Let yourself forget to watch the clock once in a while and appreciate your holiday without time, into the recesses of your own mind and see the change your ‘wasted’ time can make.

 

Did you know: William Faulkner never received a high school diploma and was rejected from the army based on height and went on to win the Nobel Prize and release his first book (poetry) at the age of 27?

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