The Perfect Time – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

How do we put a value on our scarcest resource?

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

One constant in life is that time never stops. It’s scarce, and everyone gets the same amount, which makes it enormously valuable. Since it’s limited, every moment counts. Yet day to day I find myself caught between the present and the future, and that tension sometimes keeps me from living the perfect time: the present. When I do manage to notice it, I feel a freedom and calm I’d like to have all the time, because that’s when I get the most out of such a limited resource. How do I value my time? How can we value ours?

The first barrier is blindness to reality. We’re all born with two qualities that help us live: reason and conscience. Deep down we usually know the truth about what’s bothering us. Still, the fear of facing something new, of leaving our comfort zone and daring to take the next step, holds us back. How do we get past that blindness?

Focused decisions. By focus I mean the life purpose we carry inside, the other innate human quality, the one that answers what our things are for. Decisions are part of every day, a universal menu the whole world wakes up to. But deciding for the sake of deciding, drifting with the current, is still part of that blindness, of the comfort zone, of the fantasy that something or someone will make life’s decisions for us. Deep down we know that a large share of our results comes from our own effort, and a large share from the Great Creator.

Chasing results while staying committed to a purpose clearly takes responsibility and discipline. Above all, it’s a chance to feel the inspiration of a life in harmony, with a clear north. Between decisions and results lies time, which is why we need to give it our own meaning: that’s how we see the size of what we want and how hard we’re willing to fight for it.

We value time through the quality of attention we bring to what we do. Plenty of things scatter that attention, but splitting it between past and future may be the biggest waste of all. The past has already happened. The future is something we can look toward with the drive to reach what we want, more than to avoid what we fear.

You can see the value of time in the small wins that mean, or meant, something real in our lives. The challenge is learning to value what we’re holding right now: this unique present, which can feel intangible, yet, like time itself, is a permanent constant and the only thing that never stops. If life is made of indivisible pieces of time, adding them up at the end of the day, or at the end of our life, should leave us with the joy of having made good use of something very brief, entrusted to us on one condition only: that we live it fully.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: How to stop procrastinating. A short video on procrastination from Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a one-of-a-kind thinker who keeps drawing me in with the clarity of his arguments and how simply he lays them out.
• What I’ve been Listening to: The beatification of Carlo Acutis. A wonderful example of a life guided by purpose and lived with the end in mind. I loved the ceremony and the special, very timely message Blessed Carlo Acutis left us.
• What I’ve been Reading: The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Genetic scissors, a major discovery that has transformed many fields over the past decade, especially health and agriculture. The short article is worth reading to understand what it’s about and, above all, how deeply its origins are rooted in nature itself.
• What I’ve been Learning: An introduction to Odoo. What is Odoo? A remarkably powerful open-source ERP and CRM I just discovered and really like. It scales surprisingly well, and my favorite part is how many apps or modules you can add to keep everything in one place. A vital tool for anyone starting a company, thinking about starting one, or running lots of processes across different programs who wants to bring them together.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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