Own Your Life

The great equalizer for all of us is that we each have twenty four hours in the day. We spend it or it spends us. Tick, tick, tick. It passes reliably, unrelentingly, and irretrievably for every one of us.

Years ago I heard the fretful acronym FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out. Friends were anxiously having to decide what to do out of the plethora of options: parties, concerts, movies, dinner dates. And they would dash from one place to another driven by FOMO. But missing out is the nature of reality. Not missing out is a frantic delusion. You will always be missing out—not just on something, but on almost everything. So the question becomes: What do I want to let capture my wholehearted attention? This meal? This conversation? This book? This work of art? This cup of coffee? This friend? The answer matters because you will, by the nature of time, be missing out on every other thing—and always have been.

It’s not possible not to miss out. When you listen to music you miss out on the silence. When you sit in silence you miss out on the music. And on and on and on. So, whether you deliberately choose, or let the tick, tick, tick of time choose for you, missing out is the fantastic essence of the game. What’s important is that you stay awake, choose where to put your wholehearted attention, rather than let your minutes slide by in a groggy haze.

You could let this level of awareness about your life make you anxious, worrying about the worthiness of your choices every moment. Or you could school yourself in what you love, starting to notice what brings you peace, what stimulates your curiosity, where you find yourself engaged—and then move in that direction, away from all the people, obligations, and stuff not worthy of your unique, individual minutes. There’s no need to judge the activities as inherently worthy or unworthy. They’re not. All you’re aiming for is what kind of life you are creating rather than having the unconscious passage of time—tick, tick, tick—create you.

When you are this awake to your life, resentment falls away. So does your judginess. You’re making choices for yourself within the specific circumstances of your life without any need to convince others in order to justify what you’re up to. And you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself so that when you hear the tick, tick, tick it’s simply reality making itself known, not the panic of missing out.

Twenty four hours a day is the great equalizer. You can’t store it. You can’t hit the pause button. It’s now and now and now. You might be sitting in the garden with a cup of coffee listening to the breeze rustle the leaves of the ginger plants. You might be scrubbing the stains off the toilet bowl. You might be struggling to write a letter to a friend you’ve been estranged from. Whatever you are doing, when you miss out purposefully, wide awake to your deepest intentions, a funny thing happens. You’ll find that you have all the time in the world.