Weekend morning. I was sitting with my coffee and the rare stillness of early hours when the phone went “ting ting”. A message from an old friend: “Got anything fun to kill time with? I’m so free, so bored, nothing to do.”
I froze. Not at the message, but at one word: kill. The phrase is so worn that people say it without hearing it anymore. That morning it landed in my head with sharp edges. Why would anyone want to destroy the fairest asset a human being ever receives?
What’s actually being killed
The blunt truth is that we have never once killed time. Time flows in one absolute direction. Whether you fill it with amusement or sit around complaining, it slips away regardless. What gets killed is the youth, the opportunity, the life of the person holding the knife.
Past the halfway mark of my own life, I’ve arrived at something I call pre-awakening. Nothing lofty about it – just one clear look at the bottom of the hourglass. If the first half passed in a blink, the second will pass in the time it takes to turn my head. Seneca wrote it two thousand years ago: it is not that we have too little time, but that we waste so much of it. Still true. Still stings.
As for the boredom my friend described, I don’t think it comes from the outside world. When someone announces they’re bored, they’re really announcing that the world inside them is empty. They scroll short videos, open a game, gather at a café – and call it entertainment. It’s a flight from oneself, very well disguised.
Eight thousand kilometers of something “boring”
If life feels monotonous, learning something new is the obvious way out. An instrument. A language – not to memorize vocabulary, but to open a door into another culture. A sport, to burn off the negative charge sitting stagnant in the body.
But there’s a bigger secret: you don’t always have to go looking for the new. Renewing the old is the higher art.
Over six years I’ve run close to 8,000 kilometers. From the outside, nothing could look more repetitive: lace up, step out, run. I used to think the same – running is just running. Only after going deep did I find an intricate world living inside a supposedly monotonous act. The easy run is where I learn to loosen up, listen to my heartbeat, and build stamina of the mind. The long run is a long conversation with myself on roads where there’s no one to lean on. Intervals are the breathless surges that push the body’s ceiling up another notch. Same pair of shoes, three completely different states of being.
It turns out life is never boring by nature. Boredom shows up only when our way of seeing has gone dull and shallow. Pour your full attention into anything, however small, and you’ll touch its bottomless depth.
Sixteen hours, and the days that are truly flat
We each receive the same fair twenty-four hours. Subtract eight for sleep to rebuild the body, and I’m left with sixteen to live. Some hear that number and think it’s plenty. I find it far too little.
Though I should be honest: that feeling of “not enough” is, at bottom, a bit of greed in me. More precisely, my sixteen hours are a snug fit. Fully booked, with no gap left open for waste, because I’ve turned every task – writing, studying, stewarding a team – into something I take pleasure in.
Still, I’m flesh and blood, not a pre-programmed machine. I have days when energy hits the floor, days that are truly flat, when running shoes feel heavy and a familiar book loses all its pull. My friend answers those days by texting around for something to kill time with. I answer them by sitting down, closing my eyes, and asking one question: today, what am I grateful for?
I’m grateful that I woke up healthy this morning, limbs intact, breath still warm. Grateful to live in a country at peace, where I can stride down the street without listening for bombs. Grateful for a decent breakfast, while out there hundreds of millions go to sleep with empty stomachs.
Gratitude has a strange transforming power. When the mind turns toward what is present instead of what is missing, the flatness dissolves on its own. No comfort required. Just accurate seeing.
Busyness is also a way of killing time
This warning isn’t only for people with empty weekends. It’s just as much for the ones buried to the eyeballs, the ones who take pride in never having a minute to breathe.
I know that state from the inside. Having run an organization of more than a thousand people, I know what it is to have hundreds of problems land on you daily: revenue, staffing, strategy, meetings stretching from dawn to dark. From the outside, that looks like a highly productive man.
Seen through a clearer lens, it hides a painful truth: throwing yourself at work until you forget to eat or sleep, leaving before sunrise and returning after dark, losing your connection to family and to yourself – that too is killing time, only more sophisticated. The first way kills it with emptiness. The second kills it with overflow. In both, circumstance holds the knife.
I lived inside that machinery until a question started ringing and wouldn’t stop: what am I actually doing on this earth? The search for an answer rebuilt the way I set up my life. My calendar is still sixteen hours full. The difference is that it’s now my own deliberate choice, not the current dragging me along. I command the game rather than letting the game command me.
Down to the last grain
The word “enjoy” needs redefining too. Many assume enjoying life means fair winds all the way, calm days and steady applause.
Not for me. To enjoy is to accept fate’s game in full. I plan deliberately and give everything to the doing. When failure lands, I don’t complain. I change myself to adapt, or I learn to accept what is. For someone awake, even learning to accept is a lesson worth having.
Because in the end, win or lose, joy or sorrow, I have only half a life left to experience. Every event, every person arrives and departs like a passerby. Only my own inner stance stays.
A life is short as a shadow crossing a window. Don’t try to kill time – it’s already running out fast enough on its own. Hold each moment carefully, so that when the hourglass drops its final grain, we can still smile at having lived a life with nothing to regret.
If you find some peace in these stories, subscribe to walk with Ahaalife on the path of living awake.
Ahaalife – A life worth living.
