Time Takes Time.

Now that I have all this time, what do I do with it? Life comes from the words that we speak. Well, the words we speak are more like seeds in the ground. Some seeds will survive, some will die. The same with words. Some words will come into existence, and some words will not.

Some words that I have spoken over the years are the need to own my time. In my definition of success, the ability to own my time has always been at the core of it. I won’t necessarily consider myself a success, not yet. But I took the first step to my success, which is to own my time.

But now, I have all this time to myself. I quickly realise that I have never had time to myself. More accurately, I have never owned my time. In childhood and teenagehood, my time belonged to school and my parents. What I thought was my free time was, in reality, “reward time” my parents gave me. Because I can remember the days when I’d be grounded, and so, this “reward time” to play PlayStation or visit my friends was taken away from me.

I started getting some of my time back in university. But university life still took up my time. This was the foundation of how employment, too, would take up my time. I worked as an academic. Trust me, an academic has no free time. For an academic to have free time, there is something they need to delay for it. Like, a night out with my girlfriend over the weekend would equate to two sleepless nights during the week. Perhaps Sundays (as Saturdays I usually used for research purposes) were the only days in which time exclusively belonged to me.

When we are employed, we have an illusion of freedom. The illusion of owning our time. As they say, the salary that one earns at the end of the month is the price that you pay to sacrifice your dreams. The accurate way to say this statement is that the salary that one earns at the end of the month is the price that you pay to sacrifice your life.

Unless it is something you truly love doing, then there’s nothing wrong with employment. However, I realised that employment was taking roughly 86% of my life. Perhaps that’s why my mind cracked the way it did while I was employed.

So now, I have all my time. I can virtually do anything that I want to do, only limited by the monetary boundaries of my bank account. What’s interesting, though, sometimes I wonder what I should do with all this time. Again, from three years of age until the age of thirty, time has always been dictated by someone or something else. It has only been roughly two years since I have had control over my time.

The “hustle culture” wiring in my mind thinks that I should monetise everything. Every hobby of mine, I should find a way to make money from it. God bless the process of ageing. Because now that I am ageing, I realise that not everything should or can be monetised.

I realise that much of the books I read when I was younger, believing I could be a millionaire in two years, were more sales pitches to bring people to seminars, workshops or something that has the real money. Some books are merely motivational books that offer no sound strategy on how to make millions. Most books about successful people are a classic example of this. Elon Musk’s book, for instance, merely tells a story of a young man who escaped Apartheid and, with his intelligent brain fuelled by an insane work ethic, managed to be successful.

You get older, and you realise that these books are merely PR for the entrepreneur. We don’t know how Elon got investors for PayPal or how he had money to purchase and program on the internet and in computer science. This was the 90s; these things were far more expensive than. Steve Jobs is said to have been able to attract an investor in the early years of Apple. How he managed to attract this person, it is not discussed. Bill Gates, it was only in the late 2010s that I learned that his mom actually opened the doors for him. All this time, he was painted as this wonder kid who revolutionised computing. Their stories serve as motivation. Nothing else.

And it is one of the reasons that I no longer get easily motivated anymore. Because motivation is misleading. Especially as I have all this time. Motivation will lead me to many paths that lead nowhere. I’d be motivated, with the PR stories of successful entrepreneurs, to believe that I, too, will have a million-dollar company operating from my garage. Sadly, that’s not how it is in real life.

And not to sound gloomy, but it is the truth. It is how so many South African artists and successful people will sell the “hustle culture”, “work hard and you’ll succeed” narrative, only to discover that they got money through corrupt deals. It is hard to find South African entrepreneurs who made money clean, with no dirt under their nails. Many of the White ones have links in some shape or form with Apartheid or the lingering systematic benefits created by Apartheid, and many of the Black ones have links to a political party or some shady criminal boss.

And so, it leads me back to this position that I am in. If I were perhaps five or even ten years younger, I would pursue every idea that comes to my mind. If I failed, motivation will tell me that great warriors fall seven times but stand up eight. At my age, I realise that each fall only brings you closer to your demise. Some falls are harmless, a mere slip. Some falls, however, are brutal. You fall and break a knee. Standing the sixth time, you need a walking stick to stand erect. The seventh fall breaks your spine. You may stand the eighth time, but you will no longer have the strength you had before the first fall. You become too broken to continue fighting.

You approach tasks with caution when you are older. And so, you get to realise that life takes time. When your time belongs to someone else, we do not realise just how slow time actually is. Because employment, outings with friends and everything in-between causes time to speed up. It creates a time warp illusion that fools us into believing that time is faster than it should be.

Time takes time. I learnt this lesson when I started gardening as a hobby. Naively, I thought that if I planted potatoes today, in a week or two, the harvest would be ready. Perhaps in a month, max. Boy, was I disappointed. It took ages for the potatoes to be ready. Some days, nothing happened. You wake up and see no growth on the stem, on the leaves, or on the flowers. I have planted a few trees around the yard. Some story, nothing visible is happening, even though the leaves tell me that the tree is healthy.

Having so much time on my hands makes me realise that life is a breeze, it is the smooth tides of the ocean. Life is slow; it takes time to formulate and create ideas. It takes time to generate and implement plans. The slow rate (which I believe is the natural rate) of time that I experience is to me the true essence of being alive.

I remember this one time I had mediated three times a day for an hour each session. After the third session, my mind was so focused. I was cooking. My mind was extremely focused on what I was doing. Even switching the stove on was a deliberate and intentional action. You see, when life goes on so slowly, every minute you spend is a deliberate and intentional action.

You become active in your life, no longer passive, as someone who is employed, being told by someone or something what to do. Again, this doesn’t apply to individuals whose work gives them immense pleasure. When you realise how slow life is, everything you do begins to have meaning. Like the tree I have planted outside, I know that I do not see any visible growth. But I know that the root system is busy underground, finding mineral-rich areas so that it can anchor itself in. This focus on the root system by the tree is intentional. There is no wasted action by the tree.

If someone or something controls your time, sometimes we tend to be passive about our actions, apropos, our lives as well. Think when we were young. Our parent, who owns our time, tells us that the leaves are messy outside. You know that Autumn just began. So every week the tree will shed leaves. If you owned your time, you’d wait until the tree has finished shedding all its leaves to clean the yard. It will be more work, this is true, maybe take a full day to complete. But your parent does not see it that way. They want you to clean the yard every week while the tree sheds.

When you engage in the activity of cleaning the yard under the instruction of your parents, your actions will not be intentional. They will be hurried. Passive because your mind will be hurling insults at your parents. Or you’ll already be thinking about what to do when you're done.

But if you had owned your time and cleaned the yard when you wanted to, you would have been active. Every pull of the rack would have been intentional. Your mind would not be cussing anyone, nor will it be drifting to what it would do or could be doing. Your entire being would be within the activity of cleaning the yard.

And as you clean the yard, you will realise that you might not finish in one day. You will realise that to get every single fallen leaf would actually be a two or three-day affair. But this is not a worry to you because this is exactly what you wanted. It was not the one-day affair you believed, but to clean the yard is the goal you meant to achieve. And you are cleaning the yard intentionally because you want to do it. After you cleaned the yard, even though it took longer than expected, you’ll be filled with a unique sense of pride that you know you would not have experienced if you were told to clean the yard.

Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much when we're about to do something, then someone tells us to do it. But in any case, that’s the key thing one is learning with time on my hands. Everything I do is more intentional. I am an active participant in my life. Even the unsavoury aspects, it is easier for me to say the unwanted effect was caused by this particular action, which I actively made. It was not passive. It was not because a work colleague said something or did something that affected me.

But the biggest lesson for me: Time takes time. Time moves minute by minute. I challenge you to sit still for a minute. You’ll realise that a minute is pretty long. Employment, convenience in the city has created the illusion that a minute is a second, hours are minutes, weeks are days. This illusion makes us believe we are alive. When in reality, we are not.

Living life passively makes you an NPC in your own life. Yes, not everyone can leave their jobs. And yes, I will never suggest unemployment to a person who isn’t entrepreneurial or has a support structure because the transition from employment to unemployment is extremely brutal.

But if you have the support structure, if you have the ability to make money on your own accord, do not sell your life to employment or anything that will take your time. Owning your time is how we were meant to live. And I hope that you will experience true joy that comes from owning your time.