So I was thinking again…yeah, that really bad thing I do that winds up costing me friends. I have the most important meeting of my entire career tomorrow, and I’m trying to meditate during the calm before the storm, and I figured it was time to jaunt down something that’s been rattling around my empty head now for a coupla months.
And that something I’ve been thinking about happens to be time, and how we just don’t have any of it anymore. Who has time for anything nowadays? Kids, deadlines, chores, this, that, the other thing. It never ends…we wake up, and a few blurs later, it’s time for bed. The day is gone, poof, forever. Just gone in a sea of busy, busy, busy.
However, if you stop and look carefully around you – at nature, at life, at energy and mass, and things of that sort, you begin noticing something. Well, at least I have. And that something is this:
You can’t cheat. You can’t cut corners. You can’t conjure an advantage out of thin air. Nature will equalize all our efforts to cut her “Conservation of Energy” corners. It’s going to be tricky explaining this, so I need to be very careful with how I do so, so please bear with me.
Let’s say, for the sake of providing an effective analogy, I live my entire life eating McDonald’s. I eat this fast food morning, noon and night for breakfast lunch and dinner. Now, just bear with me here, as I’m simply describing an analogy for the sake of illustrating my thought clearly. I eat this food because it is extremely convenient; it saves me time, money (well, sort of) and effort. I can eat on the go, in my car, or right there at the shack, very quickly and conveniently so I can get back to doing all that stuff that necessitates eating quickly.
What this means is, in terms of not being able to cheat, is that, in the long run, this will ultimately cost me MORE time later on than I think I’m saving today. Let’s say that I save 1,000 hours over my lifetime by eating McDonald’s every day. All those hours were obviously saved by not shopping, preparing, cooking, eating properly and doing the dishes afterwards. What a pain in the ass! Who has time for that?!? But think about this: by eating McDonald’s every day – to save time, mind you – how much time will I lose at the doctor’s office? Sick days? Falling ill? Hospital visits? Possible bypass surgery and time spent in the hospital? What about the time I lose by simply being dead?
And all for what? So I could get back to whatever it was that was so important I’m willing to literally kill myself over it? What could possibly be so important that you’d be willing to kill yourself over doing it?
We have to make the time, folks…somehow, and someway, time must be made, because all that time we think we’re saving ourselves is doing the EXACT opposite of saving time. Those time-saving corners we’re cutting are going to cost us more time than the time-saving corner cutting was supposed to yield in the first place. Nature tends to equalize things – you can’t get something from nothing, you can’t conjure energy from nowhere, and she is always there, waiting to bring equilibrium to any system she finds any irregularity in. If you’re not spending the the you’re supposed to be spending making your food, nature will find a way to spend it for you. You’re gonna have to pay for it ANYWAY…may as well pay for it on YOUR terms.
For some reason, I know this in my gut as one of those “truths.” So, I am now very cautious about illusory advantages…I now ask myself, are there any strings attached? What’s the catch? There’s always a catch, and that catch is There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. And if there is, it is likely too good be true…perhaps this is the reason why that statement fundamentally exists.
Anyway, that’s the dumb thing that’s sort of been on my dumb mind lately in between all the work, chaos, depression and what-not.
