While researching and drafting my latest blog post for I am Infinite, I experienced a very profound moment. Such a moment of clarity, of Ah Ha! That it came with a bright light of joy and kept me on a “high” for several days.

My greatest attachment which is the cause of my grandest fear, the fear that is keeping me in a stagnate sense of being and absorbing all my energy of motivation in accomplishing simple tasks of life on earth, is the fear of time wasted and time lost.
This may sound quite juvenile, petty or even silly, but is it so detrimental to living that I can see now that many of my anxieties, worries and even my mindset is based on this fear.

Some people fear the loss of a loved one, of material belongings, of social status; me, I fear the loss of time or of wasting time. For instance, I do not fear death in the way of I am fearful of what it means to die, I fear death in that it will come too soon, that I will not use the time I have wisely, it will be wasted, lost. Time is the one thing that cannot be retrieved. Once time passes, whether it is a second or a millisecond, it is gone. Time is a perpetual movement forward and once past, it is gone, it cannot be replaced, returned, reinvented or rewound.

I find that I am so fearful of losing time that I have become selfish with my time. Selfish in that I get irritated when someone wants me to do something for him or her, because they are taking my time away from me. I believe that certain tasks are a waste of my time; therefore I refuse to do them. For instance, I am frequently asked to create data forms for information; truck maintenance logs, inventory sheets, job price lists, etc. I have done these, but the person who requested the forms does not utilize them or doesn’t like the form and wants it changed. Once completed, these forms sit on the computer hard drive, not looked at and not used. I have spent many hours creating, modifying and recreating (because the forms are lost in the terabytes of hard drive storage) that now I feel the time spent creating these forms is wasted and being I am the one creating, it is my time that is wasted by another’s desire, so I stopped creating. This has led to many arguments of lack of motivation and lack of follow-through, each of us blaming the other.

Sometimes I get so worked up in anxiousness and worry over things requested or needing to be done, that I am unable to focus on the task. I then get irritated, frustrated and eventually become angry. When all this takes place, I stop the actions needed to accomplish and become stagnate, time moves forward, but I do not. I then wallow in the self-recrimination of how I wasted time by being irritated with myself and irritated with the outcome of the failed accomplishment. This also leads me to analyze tasks as to whether or not the time spent on the task is worth losing, especially when the task is for someone else. This analyzing also wastes time, time that could have been spent on accomplishing the task or on doing something else. The time lost is sometimes doubled because of this analysis and I get irritated over the lost time. Which loses more time; this is the cycle of the fear of wasted time, of time lost, resulting in the sense of stagnation.

Upon realizing this fear, I tried to find where this fear stems from and have linked it to many things, some trivial in hindsight, but leaving a mark to create this fear nonetheless. Such things as simple as a report card comment in elementary school: “Does not use time wisely.” Looking back now, I wonder who were these educators to condemn my use of time? Then there is the time spent in a 12-year relationship where I was told that whenever I did something I enjoyed, I was wasting time. Not to mention that in hindsight of the emotional pain and scars of those 12 years, the relationship itself was a waste of time. Twelve years of time lost.

When I wanted to go to college to be a forest ranger, I was told I would fail, that I was wasting my time in trying. And now, as I investigate my spiritual balance and write these articles, I am told I am wasting time because I am not earning enough money, fast enough or that spirituality is an illusion and therefore a waste of time. It seems like whenever I have desires for myself or do something I enjoy, I am told I am wasting my time. Who are these people to tell me how to spend my time?

My perceptions of situations have also contributed to this fear. I have spent the last 7 years helping someone else obtain their dream and have been criticized for wasting time, for not doing enough, that I feel the time I do give is unappreciated so why should I give more? Due to constant criticism of the way I give my time to others, I believe I am wasting my time. It is my time after all and once time passes, I cannot get it back. So, I have become selfish with my time, attached to my time, fearful of the loss of my time, fearful of the wasting of my time that I do not give my time to others easily. I hold onto my time with a death grip.

I am so fearful of wasting time, of losing time that even the everyday tasks of survival, of living sometimes irritate me. These include cooking, going to work, sleeping, and sometimes even taking a shower. To top it all off, as I sit here writing this I wonder; am I wasting time in writing this, in acknowledging this fear? The fear of time wasted, of time lost…

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