The same 24 hours of time is rationed out to each and every individual, and how we spend it is always a choice.
Either we trade time for money to work to survive,
or to create wealth to thrive,
or we invest our time in a simpler life for which we strive.
Time is the great equalizer. It’s the one thing we can never buy more of; that’s why the greatest punishment, second only to death, is to take away someone’s time. A prison sentence is called “doing time,” and death is the moment our time runs out. How we spend our time beyond survival mode is always a choice; so when someone offers us their time, we must respect it, honor it, and see it as the gift it is.
No one person has an abundance of time, merely an abundance of choice for how they spend their time. When someone offers to do something for us, it’s not because they “have time” but rather because they “make time.” They choose to spend their time on us, or for us, from a place of caring, not from a surplus of time.
Before we offer our time to anyone or anything, we must understand there are no refunds for the price we pay for that time. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, “The price of anything is the amount of life [time] you exchange for it.” Therefore, it’s imperative to choose wisely the people and places we give our time to.
When we feel seen and heard, we can feel welcomed, accepted, and as if our time is being valued. When we feel cherished and respected for the expression of our authenticity, we know our time has been well spent. We learn how to discern who and what to give our time to through presence. When we’re grounded in our bodies—fully whole in our integrity—we are present and we are expanding time. When we’re being pulled in multiple directions, only able to give a piece of ourselves to any given person, place, or thing, our attention is scattered; and our time becomes ashes blowing from the embers that burn too hot in high winds. We honor time through mindfulness and slow living, the antithesis of the over-scheduled, rushed life.
Our children spell love as T-I-M-E. The moments we give them our full, undivided attention are the moments they will remember most and treasure. From a piece I wrote on presence, “To witness a child who feels loved because they have their parent’s full undivided attention (at least for a few minutes each day) is to witness the birth of human kindness flourish in another. For as she is taking in what it means to be fully heard and seen, she is also practicing the act of love: to be present and fully see and hear others. Our children learn how to love, in part, by how we love them.”
We make each moment count through mindful presence: doing things we love, that make us feel loved, with the people we love. A moment we spend creating joy with a loved one pays us back in dividends with memories created. When those we love pass away, we cling to old photographs and replay home movies—grateful for the time we chose to spend with them and the memories we cherish—for one of the greatest tragedies in life is that we always think we have more time than we do.
“We falsely believe that we do not have time for stillness. The truth is that if we need more time to do a thing, the best thing we can do for ourselves is not to power through but to take a break and sit in stillness to get clarity around our intentions, which keep us aligned with the flow of time. There is only one moment in time—the eternal moment of now. The more we sit in stillness, the more we learn to travel with time instead of against it.” From page 72 of Sage Words FREEDOM Book One.
This holiday season, and all year through, may we remember that our time is the greatest gift we can ever give, and the time of another, the greatest gift we receive.
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Sage Justice is an award-winning playwright and critically acclaimed performing artist who has appeared on stages from Madison Square Garden in New York City, to The Comedy Store in Hollywood, California. Ms. Justice is the author of Sage Words FREEDOM Book One, an activist, a member of the Screen Actors Guild and an alumna Artist-In-Residence at Chateau Orquevaux, France. She is a co-founder of The Unity Projectwhich fuses activism with art, to educate and inspire, with a special emphasis on community engagement to end homelessness. She has a series of short reels about living with the rare genetic disorder, Vascular Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that you can find in a highlight reel on her Instagram page @SageWords2027.
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