Clichè have become an important part of our lives and condition the way we live; while some of them are rather harmless for our happiness (i.e. “things aren’t what they used to be”), others influence heavily (and often wrongly) our choices in life.
This week’s topic is especially dear to me as I have talked about it a lot in the past… how many times have you said “I don’t have time”?
The lack of time has become, in my opinion, this millenium’s illness: we feel we don’t have the time to do the things we have and want to do and, even more so, time has become the perfect excuse to avoid doing all those things we don’t want to do.
It is time (sorry for the wordplay) we take responsibility for what we do and don’t do: if we don’t do something, in most cases it’s not because we don’t have time but because we have other priorities. Want some examples? When we meet a person that we haven’t seen for years, the classic sentence is “I thought about you many times but I didn’t have the time to call you”; when we talk with friends and discover they are taking gym classes, oftentimes the answer is “I’d like, too, if only I had the time…”; etc.
I know that it is easier to make excuses than to admit to be lazy or honest with ourselves, but this is a very dangerous behavior because in the long run we tend to believe in the lack of time and to take away from ourselves the responsibility for our lives – as if life was managed by time and we didn’t have control over it! Moreover, falling into the “lack-of-time-trap” leads us to believe that our goals are unreachable, too, and this is the worst cage we could ever build around ourselves.
