I’ve been very busy lately. Nights spent dancing with friends lead into morning brunches. Work days fade away into evenings devoted to creative pursuits. And weeks themselves zoom by, leading to weekends which are over before I even have a chance to fully sink into them.

In order to get everything that I want done, I’ve had to look at how I am spending my time and make some strategic cuts. I used to have an excess of free time. Too much time without direction, just like too much money, can lead to mental distress and bad decisions. I speak from experience. I used to have a lot of free time and I almost never used it wisely. I spent many afternoons with wine-stained lips complaining about the world and all of the miserable people in it with my other un- and underemployed friends. At this point in my life, time seemed to spread out in front of me in all directions. My dilemma was in figuring out how I was going to fill the time, not in trying to squeeze more out of the time I had. Time was a container set in front of me. It was my burden to fill it up.

Now I look at it differently and see it more as a resource to use. Time is no longer a container I need to fill, but rather a space I enter. Some spaces, like work, are narrow. When I am inhabiting this period, I don’t have much freedom and my time is not really my own. It is restricted in terms of how I can move about it. If I were to use my work time to exercise, for example, I would not be able to keep my job for much longer. So, in that way I view work as like navigating through a narrow series of passageways. Your movement is limited mostly to the functional. I’ve tried to be more accepting of the reality that the time at work is not my fully my own. Even things like daydreaming can be a way of trying to avoid that reality, and I am trying to tamper down on that and be more present in my day to day working life.

Outside of work, my free time is like a big open space, like a field or the ocean. It’s expansive but it can also be overwhelming and intimidating. It can also seem impossible to traverse. But I am starting to be more intentional about how I use my time when it does open up to me.

My biggest battle is fighting the temptation of technological distractions. It is all too easy to get caught up in screens when I get back from work. I’ve been bathed in the glow of screens compulsively for some time now. It started back when I was a pale teenager hiding away from the world, giving my Sims more time and attention that I gave my own life and the people in it. This was the 2000’s, back when most phones still flipped shut, so I feel as though I was an early victim of the infinite scroll. It’s been weird to see it slowly spread out into the world and poison other people’s attention spans like it did mine.

I have been trying harder than ever to pull myself away from passively gazing into screens as the world passes me by. It’s hard to resist that urge, but every day I do, I do feel more in control of my life. And this has led to me being happier overall. Even if the new found pace of my days sometimes hits me like a semi-truck. Sometimes, being a little tired is worth it.