#260: Two Extra Hours

When Francesca and I were dating, we agreed we definitely wanted to have kids. Then when we got married, it was a mystery how anybody had the time. Don’t you basically spend every waking moment taking care of them, and then planning for them when you aren’t together? What about, well, other important stuff?

Now that we have them (and are so very happy we did) I’m still not sure how everything that gets done in a day gets done. But somehow, as Sasha writes, we figured out how to make the time for the essential without adding hours to the day.

- Corey

TWO EXTRA HOURS

When this pandemic is over, I will start commuting back in to work.

My commute is a 10-minute walk to the train, a 40 minute train ride, and another 10 minute walk to the office. That adds up to one hour each way, twice a day, five days a week.

The question is: where will I find that time?

Right now, my days feel full.  It doesn’t seem like there are extra minutes, let alone hours, waiting to be claimed.

And yet, two full hours a day, 10 hours a week, are apparently there for the taking, from one day to the next.

Which means that if I have something really important to accomplish, today, I apparently have 10 available hours per week that I could find if I really wanted to.

The point is: the barrier between what we are doing now and what we’d like to accomplish in the future is not a lack of available time.

The barrier is the myth of scarcity.

The barrier is our need to hang on to other seemingly essential tasks.

The barrier is our unwillingness to say that this thing is something I’m going to do, no matter what.

No fuss, no drama.

Like riding a train each day, just start doing that new thing, today.