Time and my relationship with time is something I have been thinking about a lot over the past few months. Coming from a culture that is heavily focused on maximizing time, not wasting time, and utterly obsessed with chronological time, it is ingrained in me to try to make sure that I'm not wasting a single second.
In the past few weeks, I spent around 44 hours on busses, a night on a train, lots of time in airports and planes, and even on boats just getting to the places where I needed to be to "do things." At one point, I rode a bus 4 hours one way for a 2 hour event, rode it back home 3 hours, and then did the same thing the next day.
So, all the time spent in transport got me thinking about what it means to use time well or to waste it. I don't have a lot of great insight on this, but I guess it's just interesting to see how perspective can shift. I definitely don't think I would have felt good about doing two successive 7-hour roundtrip bus rides in one day at home. But here, I got to see a beautiful snow-covered landscape, take naps, be in the places I wanted to be for the activities and meetings I wanted to participate in. And while I was in the bus I realized that there wasn't anywhere else I needed to be at the time. Maybe time only feels wasted if there is something else you'd rather have been doing?
More thoughts on this in the future, maybe.
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