Use Your Time

A Lesson of Mortality

You never know when it will happen. Or if it will be you when it happens next. You think you're immune for now. You have to. Otherwise how would it be possible to make it through the day? Why not give up? Many have responsibilities to keep them here, among the living. Others love the simple fact of being alive. After a close call on Kangchenjunga Doug Scott told Peter Boardman, "You've got to be ready for it, youth. It's easy to die, and it only affects them."

It doesn't matter where you are either. A few years ago a contemporary of mine fell off an easy route, a Via Ferrata of all things, i.e. a "managed" climb, laced with cables and ladders for safety. He was once at the very top of the game of hard climbing. Another friend commented on the accident, "... when (and where) you least expect it."

Shortly after that accident I went for a bike ride with a friend from whom a surgeon had recently removed a cancerous thyroid gland. At the time he was expected to fully recover but still, a 2% chance nags. Every minute. During the time between diagnosis and treatments and trial and error he lost a lot of his fitness. He's older so it's not as easy to fight back as it once was. But he's not so old that the memory of what once was has faded. I could sense his frustration. I could almost hear the question, "Why? Why me? Why now?" And, "What if?" But he fights. He tries. And seeing it reminds me that being here to struggle at all is a gift.

Watching his battle—as insignificant as it may seem—should criminalize every wasted minute. How many do you have? How many do I have? I should use them well or at least notice when I spend them recklessly.

Of course, I know what I should do. Still, I falter. I fail. Everyone does. So I need those reminders. I need the brushes against mortality to nudge me back toward my path, to help me define what is useful and what is a waste valuable time.

A friend once suggested to me that during a time trial, where the feedback is mostly internal, I should continually ask, "Am I going hard?" If the answer is yes then I should keep doing what I am doing. If the answer is no, it's a cue to press harder.

The same is true of life; we shouldn’t trust external feedback too greatly but instead ask ourselves every single day, "Am I doing what I should be doing? Am I using my time wisely?" Some days I answer, “No” but feel powerless to fight inertia. Other days, when I see the inevitability of my trajectory—I die—I am moved by the knowledge that I can change the way I get there and what I do along the way. After all, wouldn't it be shitty to look back in that last, prolonged instant and see all of the things I could have done if I hadn't wasted my time on things that do not matter?