“Time is a bigger currency than money”

“Lost time is never found again.”

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

“The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blossoms.”

We all hear or say something on the similar lines as mentioned above regularly in our lives. Most of us have a penny-by-penny accountability of the money we spend. However, in all honesty, rarely any of us have that sense of accountability for the time we spend. Imagine laying in your bed at the end of the day, asking yourself “where did i spend the last 24 hours”. Majority of us will fail to even objectively define what we were doing for even the 18 hours out of those 24.

On top of this lack of accountability, some people choose to spend some of their time intoxicated, under the influence of mind controlling/influencing substances such as alcohol, drugs, tobacco or even caffeine.

We as human beings have two foremost responsibilities:

• To take care of our mind, body and soul. To not let anything affect our hold over it and to have total control of our our bodily senses, urges and temptations.
• To have total accountability of our time. To know when we were doing what and why.

Indulging in intoxications, results in a loose execution of both the above responsibilities. It results in loss of complete control of our resources, leading to inhibited functionalities and understanding of the universe. With this, it reduces our ability to be with ourselves, with our mind and soul, which further hinders productivity and the sense of responsibility.

Many people get intoxicated to “forget about their troubles”, or “live life a little”, or “just to enjoy”. Should you be requiring a substance to do all this? This results from a lack of control of their own mind. People require external facilities to be able to not worry, to be stress free, to enjoy at a party and dance freely, to overcome their inherent blockages. They are not comfortable with who they are and what they are thinking, and hence need something to help them get away from themselves, ESCAPE. Since we as a society have accepted intoxication as a solution to all this, we have allowed ourselves to become slaves to our inhibitions. As long as we keep resorting to these external forces to overcome our inner blocks, we will never be able to experience the true power of our mind and body. We fail to take control of ourselves, and further stop even trying it. By just getting intoxicated, lowering our inhibitions and consciousness, wasting the precious time we’ve been given, we are not ourselves anymore, and we stop growing, and get further away from ourselves. Time in a way stops, we stop living our own lives; but in reality, we are just spending our time being something else. And when time resumes, i.e. the effect of the intoxication ends, we find ourselves in the same puddle of self-loath (sometimes it even gets worse) and lesser time, and the answer to that → repeated intoxication → repeated escapism.

Similarly for caffeine, using an external substance to help you feel awake and more energetic is allowing your body and mind to be enslaved by it. This represents a lack of complete control of your mind. If you body is aching to sleep, there is no bigger responsibility you have than giving it sleep. Or if you do have greater responsibilities, then train your mind to prioritise, and focus on those responsibilities rather than sleep. As you embark on a journey to train your mind to be as such, you will see that your mind stops sending you any signals that are unwanted in the moment.

People on a journey of self growth and self improvement want to be themselves, and want to be with themselves all the time. They want to know who they are, how they are, and how they spend their time on a daily basis. Knowing well how you spend your time helps you to work on how well you spend your time. If you are not able to enjoy your own company when you are not intoxicated, how can you expect someone else to enjoy your company at that point? Is that a justice we are doing to the resources given to us as healthy human beings.

There is no enjoyment more than to feel liberated from any sense of enslavement or addiction. To have complete control of your senses, mind and body is the biggest step towards true freedom. Once you are able to achieve that, you don’t need any intoxication to be able to dance freely at a party, to be able to talk to new people, fight your anxiety, stay awake for longer when required, or any such things. The reason behind that is, you become comfortable with who you are, with what your situation is, and then you try to make the best out of it. You enjoy your time to the fullest, you want to remember everything that happens, and you feel alive every moment of the day. Your anxiety goes for a toss, and you are able to have increasing accountability of your time and an enhanced control of your thoughts. This allows you to compartmentalise and freely focus on what you want to at that particular time.

We as human beings are given a lot of privileges over other species which also brings a lot of responsibility. As Uncle Ben rightly said “with great power comes great responsibility”, we need to realise that, and do justice to the power we have been given. We owe it to nature, to have complete control of our senses, body and time at all moments, and ensure that nothing can steal from us the greatest currencies there are : Time and Health.