Making the Most of Our Time

People often urge you to make every moment count, to live life to the fullest, to remember that you never know when you might die and you don’t want to have regrets.

I live in tremendous fear of those statements (I know, I have a lot of fears!) Part of the fear of death that I have is that I fear having regret, not getting everything out of life possible, wasting time, wasting the enormous opportunity of a human embodiment. It’s this fear that drives me to always be improving myself and immediately changing and fixing anything that’s not working for me.

But this fear also robs me of a lot of joy and makes staying present very difficult too.

I noticed it in particular when my parents came to visit me a few weeks ago. They live about an eight hour drive away so I don’t get to see them all that often, maybe four or five times a year. Naturally I wanted to make the most of my time with them. But that meant that I cut back on my sleep considerably because I was too anxious about missing a single second of their visit. Even worse, it meant that even when I was actually in the process of spending time with them I was worrying that it wasn’t quality time. Like no matter what we were doing I was wondering if we should be doing something else, something better, something more memory-making. It was so exhausting. And it made it really hard for me to enjoy seeing them. Even in the midst of visiting with them I wanted more, I couldn’t stop thinking about how soon they would be leaving, counting down each second and panicking that I wasn’t packing enough value into those seconds.

Ridiculous, right?

Yet now I realize that I do that a lot. If I’m watching TV I wonder if I’m wasting my precious and hard-won life. If I’m playing a game with friends I worry that I’m not maximizing my time towards enlightenment. I have a ton of guilty around any activity that is relaxing and not productive. And then even the productive things I start to worry that I’m wasting my energy and my life in petty hustles to build money.

I don’t want to let the Gods down. I don’t want to have any regrets at my deathbed. But those desires are making it very difficult for me to ever relax, unwind, or even stay in the present moment.

This week Brad and I are on vacation and I am going to work on fully enjoying it and try my best not to panic as I anticipate it ending.