Do what you've been doing, and do it more deliberately: take back your time. Not dramatically, not all at once — hour by hour, the way you'd reclaim a room that's been gradually filled with other people's things.
I've been thinking about how we lose time, because the losses are so various and so constant. Some moments are torn away — genuine demands, real emergencies, things that couldn't be helped. Some are quietly lifted from us while we're not paying attention — the long conversation that went nowhere, the errand that multiplied into an afternoon, the habit of beginning things we don't finish. And some simply slip past while we're neither working nor resting but suspended in the middle, doing that which is not to the purpose.
The third kind is the one that should shame us most. Negligence is the worst thief because it requires no external agent.
Here is what I've come to understand, and what I want you to understand: we are already dying. This is not a dark thought — it's a clarifying one. The years behind you are in death's hands already. What's left is what remains. And the person who genuinely grasps this doesn't need to be told to hurry; urgency arrives on its own.
We guard money carefully. We track what we spend on cheap and replaceable things. We feel the loss of small sums and note them in our accounts. But time — which cannot be returned, which cannot be earned back, which even a grateful recipient cannot repay — we give away freely, to anyone who asks, without so much as registering the cost.
Nothing is ours except time. Everything else was lent.
I'll be honest with you about my own practice, since I'm the one preaching: I'm not perfect at this. I waste some of what I have. But I know what I'm wasting and why, which is at least a beginning — you can't fix a leak you haven't located.
What I don't do is defer to tomorrow what belongs to today. The person who keeps postponing has not yet understood that life is already happening, that postponing is itself a way of living, and not a good one. There is no later version of you who will be readier than you are now.
Start now. Hold the hour you're in.
Everything else can wait. This can't.
Yours, with no time to waste,