Making Time - Final Blogpost - Flynn McNeil

Throughout my college experience, I have found myself more and more busy each and every year. Towards the end of every year when things are crazy and everything is due all the time all at once, I tend to seclude myself and kinda slink away from everyone else. I do this for a multitude of reasons, with the main reason being time. I want to ensure that I have ample time to take care of my responsibilities and, to an admittedly lesser extent (something I'm working on), myself. For the past 3 or 4 semesters, I vividly remember telling my friends “when this semester is over, I’m going to have so much more time”. Each time, I was wrong. Now, I don’t even say it anymore. More and more, I’m realizing that I’m going to have to start making time. What does this even mean, though? Time is a construct, but it isn't something we can construct out of thin air.

 

I think that Oliver Burkeman's perspective in Four Thousand Weeks was similar to what I'm trying to say. “Pay yourself first when it comes to time”, he wrote. I believe by this he essentially meant, "if you have a million things to do but one of them is personally fulfilling and special to you, do that one thing first". I definitely agree with this sentiment, and it's part of what I mean when I say that I have to start making time. In practice though, this can be pretty difficult. All of my responsibilities and the time it will take to do them can feel so heavy and it’s hard to get out from under the weight of them to prioritize myself in any meaningful way.

  

In the past, even when I do manage to crawl out from under them and prioritize myself, I engage in more distractive behaviors than fulfilling behaviors. This typically takes the form of spending time on YouTube or playing a video game or something. Here, I again agree with Burkeman that phones aren’t the problem. I could come up with a million different ways I’ve distracted myself throughout my 20s. I’ve been addicted to weed, I’ve been addicted to Reddit, I’ve been addicted to TikTok, and even now I can’t even eat my dinner without a YouTube video. However, I don't believe that these things that we typically point our fingers at (or more aptly, our thumbs) aren’t the problem. They’re a symptom of the overall need for distraction. Burkeman frames it as a distraction from our finitude. To some extent I agree. For me and for others, I’m sure it’s a million things. Wanting to escape the weight of responsibility, not wanting to think about someone or something, trying to relieve ourselves of stress. Ultimately, we all just want a distraction from reality sometimes. That’s not always a bad thing, however. Reality can be crushing, and escaping from that with some YouTube, DnD, video games, or what have you, can provide a positive way to not think about all of the everything for a bit. That being said, you can’t just keep running away from it all. This is something I've learned more recently and have been trying to handle in a healthy way.

 

I really like Burkeman's inclusion of the story of Steve Young in Four Thousand Weeks. Long story short, Steve is trying to become a monk, and in doing so, is given the task of pouring melted snow over his head 3 times a day. Obviously, this is quite the horrible experience, and Steve tries his best to distract himself from the chill. I sympathize with this. Eventually though, he realizes that the more he embraces the experience and pays attention to it, the better he is able to endure it. Lately, I've found that I relate heavily to Steve. In all of my distraction attempts, I am ultimately trying to avoid paying attention to certain things. Whether that be a breakup or the crushing reality of our political landscape, I’m just trying to keep my mind somewhere else, somewhere more pleasant than it could be. These past few semesters, however, my therapists have been pushing me to try to let those thoughts in more often. In other words, I’ve been attempting to be more mindful. These efforts are what I now consider "making time" to mean for me.

 

Instead of constantly running from these thoughts that hurt me, I have started to try to allow them in little by little. Instead of instinctively running from them, I have been trying to sit with them. Instead of being scared of them, I have tried to learn from them. The emotions associated with these thoughts aren’t just here to hurt me. Pain doesn’t exist for the sake of pain. Pain exists to tell you something. These thoughts and emotions have been trying to tell me something, and I have been entirely deaf for far too long. The more that I have sat with these thoughts and emotions, the more I’ve been able to understand why I have them and what they might mean. I am not at peace, but I’m getting better at the whole process. I am no longer running from myself as often as I used to. I’ve begun making time for them – the thoughts and the emotions, and ultimately for myself. Not a lot, but I’m trying. This, at least for me, is what it means to properly pay yourself first.

 

I believe through pushing myself to continue pushing onwards like this, I will gain the ability to not only make time for myself, but for the things that I love. I feel that as I continue to learn to make time for myself, I’ll learn to make time for the other things in my life that are important. I will learn to spend more time with my friends, develop the hobbies that I love, and hopefully, be happier in the process. To take a step towards this process, I'll use this blog to post a song that I've wanted to post for forever, but haven't for a bunch of reasons that aren't important. Today, I made time to finally publish this somewhere and post it here. Insert cringy soundcloud link here.

 

I know it's sappy, but I'd like to dedicate this blogpost to the people that mean the most to me. As I've learned to make time, I've learned to also be excited for the future and the opportunities it brings. To my mom and all of my friends, I can't wait to spend more time with you soon. I'm learning to make time, and I'm going to spend it with you guys. To myself, I am proud of the things you have accomplished. Looking back at all of the progress I've made since I was an 18 year old with a huge head, I am positive that it was all time well spent.