A Letter from Chris Suarez
THE TRUE MEANING OF TIME
Well it's the first day of a new year. I love to see the excitement. The texts, the phone calls, the emails, the social media posts. The reflection on where we’ve been. The laser focus and enthusiasm for where we are going.
Humans love fresh starts and temporal landmarks. We look for certain days of the week or the month or the year to reset, to refocus, to recommit, and to recenter. We look at the year ahead as if we know exactly what we will do and when we will do it. As if we know exactly how much time we have for everything we want to accomplish. As a species we have an overall fascination with time - how we spend it, what we accomplish in it, what we can do with it, how to slow it down and speed it up.
This year brought some perspective to many of us on just how short and limited and fragile time and life itself can be. It brought perspective on how little control we have over one of our favorite things to try to manage - time. For some that perspective came from close-calls and unexpected sickness. For others, that perspective showed up in loss.
Many had much less time with a loved one than they thought they’d have. We assumed there would be more time, more weekends, more vacations, more dinners, more game nights, more movies on the couch, or just more phone calls. And today, there aren’t.
In fact, if this year didn’t bring this lesson to your table, then at some point in our lives we have or will certainly experience this.
However we can easily put too much value on the amount of time, or perhaps the limit or lack of time that we had with someone. In contrast, gauge the intensity or depth or significance of the time we did have.
I certainly would have desired to have more than just 10 short months with my mother before she was tragically killed. And yet, in those 10 short months there were lessons she taught me that I take with me for the rest of my life. Lessons on the choices we make and the outcomes they lead us to. Lessons on agency and the ability for anyone to change the direction of their life. Lessons on the value of having a loving and stable family. Lessons on what a child really needs or maybe just wants from a parent. Lessons to fill a lifetime. So perhaps those 10 months were deeper and more intense and more powerful to me than others that have had their mother by their side for 10 or 25 or 50 years.
I look for and allow the short time I had with her, or the time I have with anyone, to impact me. It is why I often say to people, even if meeting for the first time, that “no conversation is a wasted conversation.”
Don’t fall into the trap of counting time as if you know when it began, and as if you know when it might end. Be all in to whatever you are doing right now. To whatever relationships you have right now. To whatever matters to you right now. To whatever your loved ones need right now. Whether we have another ten years or just one, whether we have another month or just a week, show up as if that time matters equally. Show up with a fire to make that time matter.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his meditations, “The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.” If we have a fire for living a life of experiences and high engagement, then regardless of what is thrown into that life, we will create something beautiful and find the bright side.
We need not know what may be thrown in front of us this year or what we may be asked to deal with in 2022. We need only show up to this year, and each day that is part of it, with the right perspective. Intend to make every interaction valuable. Make every conversation meaningful. Make every moment matter.
Chris