Wasting Time

“What a waste of time!”

Probably the ultimate insult or rebuke, an inference that some small portion of your existence has been stolen by an experience or activity so useless, so pathetic as to leave you with nothing of value whatsoever.  Well, I’ll never get those two hours back.  It’s the movie “Forecast: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs III.”  The 500-page autobiography of some bureaucrat with delusions and no writing skills.  Or a mandatory visit with some distant relative you’ve never liked and with whom you have absolutely nothing in common.

But…are those really wastes of time, total losses with nothing of value, a tiny theft of your life?  Sure, the time could have been better spent.  Experiencing a magnificent sunset, writing stirring passages for the Great American Novel, or taking your kids on an adventure would all be deemed much more fulfilling than those earlier alternatives.  But our lives don’t consist of an endless series of pinnacle moments.  Taking out the garbage or repainting the backyard fence may not be highlights of your existence, but neither would they be termed a waste.  So, if the mundane and necessary portions of our lives – like those 8 hours at the office – aren’t deemed a waste, then what is?

Recently, I found myself reading a book that was just completely out of my genre.  It was the extreme edge of urban fantasy with wizards and vampires and werewolves battling just behind the scenes of our oblivious society.  It had an adequate style, a fast-pace, and a great deal of gory action with a touch of gratuitous sex.  I put it down after about 50 pages.  I never established a link with any of the characters, making their actions and dangers a matter largely of indifference to me.  The settings were unreal, the conflicts meaningless, and there was nothing to appeal to my emotions.

But was that book a waste of my time?  No.  I learned things about problems with development and settings, about what causes the reader’s early interest to slip away, about techniques that are a drag rather than speeding the book along.  So, will I ever get back that hour or so I invested in reading the thing?  No.  Did I get even a modicum of enjoyment out of that hour?  Not really.  But it did expand my knowledge of the urban fantasy genre and gave me some insights into what fans of these books are looking for: lots of action, moderate gore, and a little bit of gratuitous sex.

So, how about mistakes?  Do they qualify as wastes of time?  I would say no, not if you learn from them.  Recently, my wife Margie and I were assembling three large standing flower beds that arrived in a jigsaw puzzle of bolts, screws, and carefully numbered pieces of wood.  We managed to mess up the first one by overlooking one entire step in the process and had to painfully pull the thing apart again to get back to the missed stage, something that had us grumping at each other.  But based on the venerable maxim of being older and wiser, we tackled the second in the series…only to make another mistake!  That, surely, must qualify as time wasted, right?  We ended up laughing about it and putting the third and final flowerbed together in record time and having a wonderful story to relate to others…like this!

To me, the poetry of To Althea from Prison really optimizes the issue of wasting time.  What greater waste can there be than incarceration, sitting in a jail cell with no prospect of release?  But the answer from Richard Lovelace is:

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Can know such Liberty.

Time is what we make of it, so waste, as well, is defined by us.  Another famous captive, Rene Descartes, found himself bound with a straight jacket in a mental asylum, lying flat on his back in solitary confinement.  He spent the time calculating the formula of a curve traced by a fly wandering on the ceiling above him.  We don’t always get to choose the environment in which we exist or the terms of that existence, and I’m not going to pull a Monty Python, suggesting you find the silver lining in being a galley slave.  I can’t imagine all the horrendous situations in which people might find themselves, and I know there is no single answer for all of them.  But for less severe conditions, I think we do ourselves a disservice by the designation “waste of time.”  

There is a wonderful quote from Abraham Lincoln: People are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.  It really drives home that happiness is a state of mind, and we have more control over it than we might otherwise think.  Food for thought.