Time is drifting away. Life is drifting away.

You all know that feeling when you feel like yesterday was Sunday and today is Friday. The week passed by so fast. Or maybe last month was January and now you are celebrating Christmas already. The year passed by so fast. I've been there too. Or maybe some might even say "Last year, they were in high school, and today they are celebrating graduation of their grand children." I know, I know we all are humans, and we all will be having a similar experience when glancing over our lives because we can't really recollect all the nuances of our experiences in one go.

It is important to realise that this feeling of time flying away, is because "we are" letting time to fly away. Until you are in high school, or university, you always feel there was so much happening in your life because of sheer amount of structure around you, for example, exams, mandatory home work, mandatory activities, sports days, and what not, depending upon where you live in the world. As soon as you graduate, and get into the real world when you are not obligated to answer to your parents or teachers, and the only structure remaining in life of most people is a job. Your life starts to drift away, you work and sleep, and anticipate when you can post a TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) story on your instagram.

Boat has left the shore.

Soon enough, you get so complacent in your work life that the work life becomes your world. What used to be experiences, now turns into "I used to do this" or "I want to do  this but I don't have time" chatter.

I see so many aspirations when people talk but they are stuck. They are stuck because for the better part of their life they were used to work according to the structure which was built around them for the betterment of them. Now, again they are in a structure(job, business) but that structure is built for the betterment of its own with little consideration for the people in that structure.

There won't be "the day" when you will be able to start doing what you want to do, and soon enough you'll realize that you have turned 60. Retired, maybe a millionaire but your body can't keep up with your aspirations because you couldn't even make time for your physical fitness.

Don't let the boat drift away.

There's only one way to not let your drift away without any influence of you. You'll never have absolute control over your life and life will not go exactly how you want it to be, but to be present is always in your control. The moment you start to be more present you'll realise that you need to create your own disciplined structure. Think of it as a school timetable. YOU decide how much sleep you "need", YOU decide at what time you want to do the activity that you wanted to do. Start from making just 10 minutes of time in your day for that activity. 10 minutes is a small amount of time, but it is big enough to make you feel that you are in control of your time. You do that for few weeks, you'll want to create another 10 minutes for another new aspect of your life, while increasing time for previous activity.

That act of allocating 10 minutes of time of the day for activity that you wanted to do, initiates a snowball effect. Just make sure that in those 10 minutes you don't let any problem, any other thing or person of your life to interfere. Just be present in those 10 minutes.

Soon enough, you would want to make more time for other activities but you'll realise that you don't have any, but you'll realise how much time you waste on things like social media, so you'll start cutting down your screen time. Your priorities will start to change, you'll want to make your life more efficient for YOU, not because your boss wanted the work done on deadline. Now, you'll become a person who does things instead of being a chatter head who keeps narrating those old stories again and again.

Sooner rather than later, you'll start to value your time more than anything. And the day, you start valuing your time, your relation with life and people will change for better. I'll talk about that in next post.

That's it for this blog post and if you feel that you've something to add to this or you have a different perspective then share it and discuss it on r/StoicHuman or go to the Reddit discussion post for this blog post linked down below.

Stay healthy, Stay safe!

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