Author: nutterprojects

East meets West in most things.

Why The Sacrifice?

My grandpa volunteered to leave home (Australia) to fight the Japanese empire in a foreign land, thousands of kilometers from home.  My young grandma was pregnant at the time with my dad.

My great grandma on my Mom’s side left Southern China on a wooden vessel, heading south into the unknown, the only certainty she had was that she would never see home again.

Choices were made at significant personal cost.  What propelled them?  What was the value they saw in stepping into the abyss?

I sit here sipping on an organic dry red, candlelight licking at the brushed aluminium corners of my Apple laptop.  I have Australian sheepskin shoes on my feet, and am gazing at wooden christmas toys hand carved in the Saxon Mountain ranges of Germany.  I have never wanted for anything.

The number of layers of protection I am cocooned in thanks to my friends, my family and the state make it impossible for me to understand what my forbears felt as they pushed off from the shore.

As we trudge to work shoulders hunched, wishing the work day was behind us rather than still to come,  I have to wonder why we are unable to make our own leaps of faith towards carving out a different existence.

The Paradox That Is Time

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Time has to be one of the most paradoxical things that we all have an intimate relationship with.  On one hand, it has tremendous value as nothing can be done or achieved without it.  Yet, we struggle to truly understand and leverage its value as we do not consider it scarce.  The two minutes we kill by watching a cat video is soon replaced by two more.  How do we harness this resource? 

We all know that we get more value from the hour before a deadline than the hour after it. But! Not so simple!  Much like other commodities such as gold and oil, time is truly fungible.  A minute spent waiting for your final grade at the university of Shanghai, China lasts exactly as long as 60 seconds spent gazing at the Teletower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, Germany.  So why the difference?  And how do we ensure that we make the most out of our time?

The interesting thing is that we almost always initially and erroneously feel that we have infinite time (and therefore do not value it), until we are faced with the reality that we don’t.

Managing Our Relationship With Time

I am convinced that the formula to a life worth living is dependent on our relationship with time.  If we distill our thoughts and actions down to their rawest of motivations, we see how each moment was viewed either as a precious resource, or a painful reminder of our potential that we need to escape from.  How we consistently treat these little packages of time over our years lead to drastically different outcomes. 

Oscar Wilde doesn’t think we can kill time without injuring eternity.  I hope we heed his advice.