'Lost time is not found again.'

Image Source: Library of Congress

I've lost so much time that I will never get back. I whiled it away chasing shadows and vague notions of right. Sometimes, I chased wrong, too, just for the thrill of misbehavior.

I took a quick life expectancy survey just now. I have no idea how scientific or reliable said survey is, but it puts my life expectancy, based on fitness level, socioeconomic factors and bio-metrics at no less and no more than 101 years. That's 14 years more than most people my age.

I'll take it. I can't recoup the time I've wasted, but I can maximize what's left.

I start to think in terms like these when I analyze just how much unproductive time I've spent. How many hours have I swiped blindly at my smartphone? How many weeks worrying over the opinions of others? How many years working on everybody else's dreams but my own?

The quote in the title of this blog post is from a Bob Dylan and The Band collaboration called "Odds And Ends." What I did not realize is that Dylan most likely borrowed it from Ben Franklin. I've been spending time with the Walter Isaacson biography of Franklin, and the amount the founding father accomplished is staggering. He seems to have never been idle.

Isaacson recounts how Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac" was one of the printer's most profitable endeavors. The annually published book featured homespun wisdom in the form of quips and sayings that praised the virtues of industriousness and frugality that were so important to Franklin. One of them was, "Lost time is never found again."

Franklin lived to be 84. He understood the value of time. Though time can be lost, thankfully, wisdom can be timeless. It can be rediscovered in a basement in Woodstock, N.Y. in 1967, and again in repurposed bedroom in 2016.

Best-case scenario: 71 years left. Better make them count.

I have no cause to complain.

Try and go a day without complaining. It's almost impossible. Whether you verbalize it or keep it internal, complaints worm their way to the surface, poisoning thoughts and attitudes.

I've been trying -- with mixed results -- to complain less. It's difficult to stifle the whiny voice that pipes up at the first sign of discomfort, or the slightest hint of insult. Taking it a step further, when I hear that voice start to chime in, I try to turn whatever it's saying around and find something positive behind it. This mental exercise is taken from this video by Jocko Willink. Watch it. It will get your blood pumping.

If for no other reason, I've prioritized eliminating complaints because complaining is not a constructive enterprise. From my experience, it produces only more negative thoughts and feelings. It further sours outlooks and dispositions. It's also contagious. I've seen it bring down an entire office. It is an ineffective use of time and effort.

If time is the ultimate commodity, and complaining is not a constructive enterprise, then why bother complaining? I have too much to do, and I'm sure you do, too.

Whiskey and time travel.

If you open a bottle of whiskey, pour yourself a glass and take a sip, you've traveled through time. I'm traveling through time right now as I write this, sipping some Evan Williams single barrel bourbon. For the uninitiated, a single barrel whiskey is a whiskey that has been bottled from and aged in one barrel it's entire life. When you taste a single-barrel whiskey, you're tasting the confluence of chemistry, biology and time that occurred in one specific spot during one specific time period. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the distiller will even mark the label with the bottling date.

The whiskey I'm sipping was bottled on November 5, 2005: three days after my 19th birthday, my freshman year of college. I sip and return to that time of supreme awkwardness, self-doubt and fear. I didn't know it yet, but in a few weeks, my life was about to veer down some dark roads.

It would take another six years to piece it all together. While I wandered the dark roads, I made bad decisions. I hurt people I cared about. I lost friends. I lost family members, but was too emotionally stunted to properly mourn them. I latched on to vague ideas of who and what I should be. And all along, depression sunk its claws deeper and deeper in my back.

And all along, this bottle waited for me. It sat in a Kentucky rickhouse while I became a journalist. It stewed in the sweltering summer heat while I wrote my first pieces of fiction on the third floor of the college library. It absorbed the tannic acid of its charred oak barrel while I played in bands, wrote songs, went on road trips, reconnected with my grandfather, learned to drive a manual transmission, and fell in love. It spent its last Kentucky summer while I planned my proposal and eventual marriage to my beautiful fiance. 

And on April 20, 2015, I uncorked this bottle, took a sip and traveled through time. I remembered all of this and was reminded that all of the best things in life -- love, human beings, creativity, whiskey -- they all need time.