Author Archives: Spencer J Smith

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Free Time Costs Time

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A year ago, I went to Italy. I did it for a program I no longer study and to learn about myself. I didn’t go with an American group. I went by myself and lived in an international student dorm for three months.

It was life-changing. The most life-changing part was that for three months, I had an insane amount of free time. I was in class only about seven hours a week, and my reading outside of class never took me more than ten hours a week. If I had consolidated all of that into one day, I would have been able to do it without any problem. Essentially, I had six days of free time.

I am rather sure that at no point in my life will I again have that much free time. Free time like that sounds wonderful, but it isn’t. It’s frustrating and heartbreaking and hard. It involves a lot of sleeping and a lot of dreaming and a lot of thinking about the world. And it’s aggravating.

I’ve been really super busy lately, and I find myself continuing to think back to those three months and thinking that it would be really great to go back to that. But then I remember how much I love most of the things I am doing right now and how much I hated doing nothing for extended periods of time and how even when I had a bunch of time, I still didn’t get everything done that I wanted to get done.

We don’t evaluate what we are doing often enough. We think that time grows on trees. We think that we can find it lying underneath couch cushions like lost change. We think that it is hidden at the bottom of bottles or in a kiss. It’s not, though. Steve Jobs once said:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

A year ago I went to Italy. That year isn’t being kept on a shelf.

What do you do with your time? Do you really love it?

 

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Take a Risk, Read This Post

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Some days I don’t feel like writing. Those are typically the days when I most need to write.

I started writing today with a post in mind. I was going to write about crushes and mushy stuff like that. Then I texted my friend and was trying to find this quote for my post, and I realized I didn’t want to write about crushes and mushy stuff. What I wanted to write about was life and allowing yourself to experience it.

I am a person. I am a person who wants to be something. I am not currently that something. But I believe that I have a responsibility to the people around me to continue to be the person I currently am. And so I refuse change and stay away from things that I know would be difficult for me or that would challenge me.

This is all kind of deep. Donald Miller says it much better.

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath… We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it? – Through Painted Deserts

I asked a friend once if I take risks. And she said, “no.” Then I tried giving her counterexamples. What about the time I kept that library book until the last minute? What about the time I skipped class? What about the time I spent $10 on a book I wanted? First, she laughed. Then she told me that those were all calculated risks – that I was taking risks that ultimately didn’t matter, that had no impact on how people saw me, that didn’t affect me in any significant way. She was right.

If there is something I really want and the only way I can get it is by taking a risk, then I don’t do it. That’s silly. Life’s too short and all that jazz.

Help me take risks and leave your encouraging risk-taking story in the comments!

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Why God is the Opposite of Boobs

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I got your interest with that title, didn’t I? It’s true though. And it’s not because I’m trying to gender God or something. Maybe God is a woman and then She would be opposite of Her boobs. That’s all I’m saying.

When we are little (like before-we-can-move-by-ourselves little), we have very little concept of the world. And it is theorized that new-borns believe that the entire world is their mothers’ breasts. That’s all there is to life. Nothing else matters or is important. They, supposedly, are consumed by their little newborn perception of that breast. And that’s all that is going on.

Well, then fast-forward a decade or two, and life seems really really complicated. We deal with careers, school, mortgages, children, spouses, significant others, aging families, funerals, marriages, births, birthdays, war, taxes, depressions, disease, and all the other stuff we think is important. And we think we have grown vastly superior to the baby who cannot comprehend anything other than her mother’s breast.

But the truth is that we still haven’t reached a sophisticated truth. Sure, life isn’t all about boobs. It’s good we learned that. (Maybe some people are still trying to get over that part.) But it’s silly that we think that life is all about all of the various things we surround ourselves with now. Why should ten, twenty, thirty years make all that much different.

It’s funny because we often include God in this list of stuff that life is about. But we would be much closer to understanding what God’s power was if we said something like God is life. We used to believe that boobs were life. That was wrong. God is life probably isn’t all that wrong. God’s kinda the opposite of boobs.

There’s a scene in the movie V for Vendetta when one of the characters is reading a letter from one of the other characters, and the letter-writer says that her grandmother used to tell her that “God was in the rain.” I try to remind myself of that every time I find myself uptown without an umbrella.