Filling Life Too Full

Here I am again, preparing to write a blog post that isn’t incredibly helpful, but more like… emotional vomit. My sincere apologies. I guess that’s what happens when you shove a blogger into a college and assign them a lot of things they love.

Two Numbers

168.

112.

What’s important about these numbers?

The first is the total number of hours in a week. In essence, that number is the life of time. In life, we often repeat things week-to-week, and so you have one hundred sixty-eight hours to take everything you want to do with your life and map it out.

Except… we don’t really have one hundred sixty-eight hours, because our bodies need sleep. If we follow what science says, we need between eight and nine hours of sleep daily. If we follow that at the bare minimum, that leaves us with the second number: one hundred twelve.

That’s really not a lot of time. It sounds like a lot of time, but it’s not. If you spend half an hour eating each meal, that’s eleven and a half off for the week, plus seven hours (give or take) getting ready for the day/getting ready for sleep. Five hours or so of simple commuting: getting from one thing to the next.

We’re down to eighty-eight and one half hours.

Okay, let’s be honest, few of us actually get eight hours of sleep. Let’s assume seven and say we have ninety-five and one half hours.

Leisure technology can take off as much as fourteen hours of that. The average person puts forty hours of the week into either work or school.

So where do we stand?

Forty-one and one half hours.

Now it’s time to panic, isn’t it? Take out “breaks” for snacks, restroom runs, and wasting time, you’re left with roughly thirty-five hours in a week to do the things that matter to you: your family, your friends, your passions and hobbies.

Life, for me, is full. That thirty-five remaining hours is stuffed full of theatre (a good fifteen hours each week), friends (less time than I’d like), and the rest goes to hobbies. And this is a hobby, this very post. Writing this for you is a hobby, a passion I happen to enjoy.

But I’ve only got a few hours each week.

Am I spending my time right?

I don’t know about you, but I ask myself that question a lot. Because I don’t know. I’ve got no idea whether I’m using my time right. Am I using it efficiently? No. I know that for a fact: there’s always room to be more efficient. I could spend less time on technology, except that’s how I communicate with a lot of my friends and family. I could spend less time with school and work, except that’s responsibility and I can’t just ignore that. I could do more of this, less of that, shave off minutes and seconds and add them to my “free-time”.

But I don’t.

Instead, I stuff my time as full as I can, adding up the minutes and the moments so I know I’m still under that number: 168.

It’s easy to fill life full. There are so many good, good things to invest in and be a part of. I want so many things, I want to be filled with so much and strive to achieve so many things.

Then I hit that number. My life presses against the ceiling that time has given it, hunches its shoulders and twists about to find more room, more space.

More time.

That’s the thing about time: when there’s no more room, there’s no more room. Even as I type, I’m watching the clock to make sure that I finish this in time to get to the next thing.

Wait.

If I’m rushed to finish this, I’m missing something, aren’t I? Whether that’s a typo (which I’m sure there’s one here somewhere that I’ll miss because I am in a hurry), or maybe something more.

Maybe I miss the point of writing this.

You’re the point, you are the reason I’m here to write this. Except I miss it because I’m too busy realizing that’s it’s time for me to go, to rush off to the next thing.

My life is full.

Each piece of my life is fitted into its spot, and I’m sitting here spinning about to keep track of it all. Each piece is a little wedge, a wedge whose point I can miss so easily.

But… if I miss the point, was it worth it?

If we miss the point of each thing in our lives, then what was the point of those things?

My life is full...

Is yours?