I confess I am one prone to rushing from one thing to the next. I’ve got a schedule packed with one great idea after another. I treat my time as if it’s inexhaustible and as if each minute I will feel as energized and as fearless as Leonidas of Sparta leading three hundred Hoplites to hold off 10,000 of Xerxes’ Persians at the pass at Thermopylae.

I confess I am one prone to rushing from one thing to the next. I’ve got a schedule packed with one great idea after another. I treat my time as if it’s inexhaustible and as if each minute I will feel as energized and as fearless as Leonidas of Sparta leading three hundred Hoplites to hold off 10,000 of Xerxes’ Persians at the pass at Thermopylae. But it rarely works out that way so I struggle like everyone else.

There are a few realities regarding time and our expectations of it that I find helpful. These realities, I believe, form the basis for what we are truly capable of and how we can truly enjoy our lives here on this amazing planet. If we were able to put these realities into our conscious mind regularly they just might make their way into our subconscious. When this happens we become automatically freed to make decisions that lead to a feeling of a life well lived.

Einstein said it best in that time is relative. We remember that when we were kids summers seemed to last forever. Then as we age as one nearly 60 year old friend said, “It seems my years go by so fast that July 4th is followed by Christmas which is followed by July 4th”. So why is that? It has to do with how fresh and new life is for us. We’re not talking about reading or watching something. I mean full body kinesthetic experiences like going down to the creek with your best friend when you’re eight years old and coming back muddy and soaked to the bone with a bucket of tadpoles and a smile on your face that stretches ear to ear.

Our energy flows differently given our environment and our mindset. You know what this is like if you go to a concert with a high energy artist or attend a favorite sports team event. Your energy level soars and you find yourself standing then jumping around and then singing or yelling at the top of your lungs. Try and read a book in either of those scenarios. It won’t work. You have to go with the flow. That said 99% of our lives are not spent at concerts or in sports stadiums. We routinely disregard how our energy is flowing when we are at work or with family. We think we can control our energy level but I suggest we’re better off if we figure out how it’s flowing and go with it not against it. Then time feels like it was well spent and we’re usually more productive as a bonus.

Humans are optimists. We believe in the impossible and then with optimism set out to bring the impossible to life like landing a man on the moon or eradicating Polio. We treat the time we have available with that same level of unbridled optimism and it routinely gets us into hot water. To have to say “No” to opportunity or to something that gets us excited seems like a waste of a life. Because we overestimate how much energized time we have available, we end up frustrated not able to “do it all”. The fact is that we can’t “do it all” because there’s more than we can possibly do it one let alone several lifetimes. Thomas Edison said near the end of his life, “So much to do and so little time”.

“Look at your fish” is what Samuel Scudder was instructed to do by Harvard’s famous Professor Louis Agassiz during a three consecutive day long interview to get into his class. Samuel was given a smelly preserved fish to look at and observe without any tools but his hands and eyes for three consecutive days of a single interview. Samuel couldn’t believe this was his task and for so long. Initially he told the Professor after a short period that there was nothing left to see and asked the Professor what to do next. He was told to simply “Look at your fish”. Once he resigned himself to the task he started to see how much there was to learn from that fish. That three day interview was one of his life’s most memorable lessons and set him on the path of a very successful career. It’s not the quantity of things we are trying to get done that makes our lives but the quality of the experience that makes the difference. We know that it’s always quality over quantity but we so easily forget.

With 189 human cognitive biases on record and counting I could easily write a four hundred page book on the topic of the realities of time. But for now I’ll save both of us the time and effort, my writing it and your reading it, and say that there’s a lot to what’s going on in our heads all the time. When we take the time to appreciate the realities of time we stand a chance of living the life we know is possible. It’s a very short ride on our big blue marble in space. Let’s make the most of how we feel about it.