This is why I treat time like oxygen.

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It started raining this morning and the internet went out because of the rain, but I already planned out how today was supposed to be..... bummer!

I can't be online without internet connection, but waiting for the rain to stop is something I wouldn't do. The rain might take two, three or even four hours and that significantly takes away 1/4 of the time I already scheduled activities for the day.

Plans can go sour

While this doesn't seem so bad, I actually consider it bad because I'm the type of guy that compartmentalizes and sees time as oxygen, always presence, always sufficient but can run out when tragedy strikes.

What do I mean?

A lot of people stops being fully functional at 50, 55 or 60, while some others with good genetics can be fully active till 70 or 80, some people might even stop being active by 30, especially if this was caused by unnatural and unplanned circumstances.

This means that while time is sufficient, it can actually run out when we least expect it.

This is why it's important to always live with the mindset that anyone can lose time when they lose the ability to walk, work, be active, lose the ability to be productive or earn income. Time is nothing when we cannot use it. This is why it gets boring when you're in the hospital, incapacitated, or generally unable to function.

For example, I started my research at 6am in the morning and covered about 10% of my daily research (estimatedly) in 2 hours, and then just as I finish my prayers and attempted to continue the research, I started noticing that it might rain (which means internet outage) I started fast forwarding my other activities for the day that might not require internet.

Why?

This means I can then continue my research at the designated times when I would have done those activities later in the day. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but one intuitive thing I could have done was try to take a nap since I mostly don't hit my 8 hours daily sleep average for the week.

It might be surprising to note that scheduling sleep time is also channeling time properly, one might be tempted to think that utilizing time carefully means always using it actively, but you can use time passively too, and one of the ways to do so is to sleep.

Sleep time is never negotiable, this is the foundation of a healthy body and mind and it cannot be replaced, and this is also because one needs to be very healthy to actually utilize time very properly.

So I didn't choose to sleep, I choose to fast tack some of my other daily activities, and another reason why I do this is FOMO (The fear of missing out). Somehow, I am of the opinion that I may have lost 9 years of my life to opportunities not taken properly.

These 9 years has been some of my most active years in life, and somehow I felt that if I had taken my chances probably, I may reduce the strain on when I'll probably not be as active anymore. Youthfulness is a blessing.

This is why time is vague and short even though we can afford to ironically waste it.

Time is oxygen, forgive those metaphor, but I like to think it's true. We always have oxygen whenever we breath in, the ability for the body to take advantage of the oxygen in the air to keep our body functional looks like an ordinary or normal mechanism, until we get sick and now require an oxygen mask to breathe.

This is the same with time, it looks like we have it, until we actually have it but cannot use it anymore because of either seen, predictable or unforeseen circumstances.

If you're like me, then it's not a bad thing, infact it can be a unique gift that the creator has embedded in you. It's better to see the urgency in treating time rightly, because we will not always be functional and this takes away the essence of actually having time.