All we have are time and choice

I believe that all that we have are time and choice of what to do. Have you ever procrastinated all day and then found yourself close to a hard deadline and thought, “Why did I not do this at the start of the day?” It happens to me more often than I care to admit.

I have the choice on how to prioritize my activities. Am I working on the most important thing right now is a question I should be asking every time I switch tasks.

Being self-employed, I pretty much dictate my own schedule. Do I meet with this person today? At all? Later? Should I answer this call? Any calls? And with great freedom comes great procrastination. So I should be swallowing frogs rather than using the internet to answer curiousities that pop up into my conscious mind.

I don’t know when I’m going to die. There’s a chance I’ll die before finishing this post. And I don’t want to die with my music still inside. So I’d better start freaking singing a song, or figuring out a song to sing. I’d hate to find myself at 72 years old saying that I wished I’d started my life’s work before I was 71 years old.

So that brings me to choice. I have some amount of time before I die, and I choose every day what to do. I have rarely been incarcerated with a lack of freedom. On any given day I can get into all sorts of trouble, help all manner of people, or just sit on the couch. It’s very hard for me to sit on the couch in reality, I have to be doing something. And I choose what that something is.

Returning to last week’s theme of country music titles, there’s a song that I liked in my country phase that talked about going bull riding once you find out you’ve got cancer or something like that. It encourages in a mournful tragic way. It invites the listener to live like they were dying, which in fact we all are. Unless there’s some club with a secret handshake and a font of eternal youth that I don’t know about.

How much time have you got? What’s on your bucket list? What are you going to do today to work towards it?

As Tim McGraw croons, “I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu”. That’s what I want to be able to say by the end of tomorrow. No more mediocrity, pettiness and sitting in traffic.