Time
One year of life is worth more than twenty years of hibernation.
My first proper job was at the Waterfront in Polzeath, a seaside bar on the beach. I was 18, innocent, and pink-cheeked. This innocence got me out of trouble, although the manager nearly fired me on the first day (I poured a pint of Doom Bar into the lap of Tony Blair's brother). I never did get the knack of the coffee machine, either, so I spent my days' glass washing and cutlery polishing (to the delight of my long-haired colleagues—these were the worst jobs on the rota). I lived in Robbie Love's during the summer, a crack-den cum campsite just over the headland. I surfed, watched The Office, and slept in a caravan awning. Aside from the hours and the pay and the bed lice, life was good.
Finally enough, today I'm back at the Waterfront. This time as a guest rather than in a sticky apron. I've gone full circle, and I can feel the ghost of my former self sweating from table to table. Today, the service is worse (of course), but the coffee has improved, and the glasses are, to my dismay, cleaner. Waves roll to shore at the far end of the beach, and, nine years later, I reflect on how time goes fast and slow.
The summer in Polzeath still feels long. I have more memories of it than of all my summers spent in London—together. Time is relative: it goes at different speeds at different times. We don't need to travel at the speed of light to test this; we only need to remember the eternal summer holidays of our childhood. At the start of To Shake the Sleeping Self, Jedidiah Jenkins writes:
…when you are a kid, everything is new. You don't know what's under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This is, I believe, why time mores so slowly as a child—why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second.
It's true! Yet, we can artificially create the long warm evenings of school summers by exposing ourselves to new things. Not by doing more, but by doing differently. New restaurants, places, and ambitions; new plans or practices. New holiday destinations or homes altogether.
How we spend our time gets an order of magnitude less attention than how we spend our money. Yet, time is irreplaceable, and you can't borrow it from Barclays. I have 313,000 waking hours left (assuming I reach 81.26—despite my historical smoking, I hope I surpass that). This doesn't seem like a whole load of time—56 years or so. Sadly, it's not an unthinkably vast number (like a billion).
Consequently, I often feel trapped between the boat and the harbour wall when it comes to spending my time. I love being alone, yet I also love hanging out with weird people. There is an equilibrium that I spin past on some wild social pendulum, flinging from extremes. Too much socialising? Go to India alone. Too much alone-time? Fill the diary with junk-food social events.
But the rough end-of-life calculations above are kind of irrelevant when one year can feel like twenty, or a decade can go by in an afternoon. Anthony De Mello writes "One year of life is worth more than twenty years of hibernation." How, then, can one live? I think it's by doing more new and surprising things, so we can be thunderstruck, again. To live the feeling of 'wow' you get when you're tripping. For me, travel is a way to wake up. This passage, again from To Shake the Sleeping Self, resonates:
But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guide books and followed the instructions of my friends. I can't know a smell until I've smelled it. I can't know the feeling of a New York street until I've walked it. I cant feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can't small the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back.
My week in books 📖 🐛
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
“If you want to be happy, you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama. This is the part that thinks there’s a reason not to be happy. You have to transcend the personal, and as you do, you will naturally awaken to the higher aspects of your being. In the end, enjoying life’s experiences is the only rational thing to do. You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Go ahead, take a look at reality. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. You’re going to die anyway. Things are going to happen anyway. Why shouldn’t you be happy? You gain nothing by being bothered by life’s events. It doesn’t change the world; you just suffer. There’s always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it.”
Game Thinking For Rapid Innovation by Amy Jo Kim
“The most powerful story is happening inside your customer’s head, a personal narrative of how engaging with your product will transform them into a more powerful, more skillful, more connected version of themselves.”
Thanks to Selman for the rec!
Have a nourishing week, all.
Hector
This is a great letter