During Andre Agassi’s farewell press conference, he touched on a subject that I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent weeks—the cost of our actions. He said that all the time he put into training, and traveling, and playing tournaments was time that he took from somewhere else—his family, his foundation, his community, his friends, etc.
In a sense, every decision we make is economic. Any time I choose to read, I’m making a decision to not spend time with family or friends, or in producing a manuscript, or in working on my health. And any time I choose to do one of those other things, I’m making the decision to not do everything else.
Of course, we need to spend time making a living, and handing out with friends, and nurturing our health, and feeding our mind and soul. So, I’m not taking a negative view of the economy of time. In fact, I think seeing our time as economic in nature can help us to find a balance between all of the necessary endeavors we need to pursue, and it can help to weed out activities that are not only a waste of time, but a waste of time that takes away from something, or more importantly, someone, we love.
Several years ago, I met a writer named Jo Kadlecek at a writer’s retreat. She wrote a book called Feast of Life: Spiritual Food for Balanced Living. I devoured her book after I got home. Check it out if you get a chance. She points to our need for balance in the following four areas of life: (1) solitude, (2) service, (3) community, and (4) contemplation. In the first chapter, she makes this point:
“Many of us fill our lives with ‘nervous activities’ that can never ‘satisfy the longing of the heart’ [she’s referring to a quote by A.W. Tozer]. What happens as a result? We get so busy looking spiritual that we neglect our solitude with God. Or we become so immersed in our community relationships that we forgo the nourishment of individual contemplation. Or we serve and give of ourselves until we collapse from exhaustion, feeling discouraged, hopeless, and far from God.”
I think she’s giving us the benefit of the doubt in a big way. I’m not so sure that most of us are so engaged in attempting to look spiritual, or in immersing ourselves in community, or in service to others that we feel hopeless and far from God as much as we are spending time in the nervous activity of simply pleasing ourselves in ways that have no lasting or pertinent value.
Wasting time on things that don’t matter is a big concern I have for my own life. I’ll never make all the right decisions when it comes to how I’ll spend my time, and some days, I’ll fail miserably. But seeing time as economic in nature helps me to get back on track more quickly.
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