Seneca pointed out that people tend to be reflexively stingy with their money, but almost comically wasteful with their time.
There are at least two ways to take this. One is that Seneca thought he used his time better than you and I do, and maybe he did. Another interpretation is that everyday life, for most people, is an untapped gold mine. Certain undone tasks represent huge gains, waiting just a short time away, behind one session of elbow grease. Even ten or fifteen minutes of directed effort, judiciously applied, can improve your life far more than the wages you earn for the same period.
This principle is most obvious when you use that time to fix a broken thing. The broken things in our lives are constantly charging interest. They feel bad to use, or even to witness, and they never run out of bad feeling to impart. Trying to use a pen that barely writes or a vacuum cleaner with poor suction is awful, even if it’s a small-scale awfulness.
Brokenness takes many forms. There are the obvious, literal forms of brokenness: the leaky faucet, the wonky table, the wobbly bike, the drawer that grinds, the door that sticks. There are also the more figurative, more spiritual forms of brokenness: the unanswered letter, the crooked painting, the book with no spot for it on the shelf, the filthy screen protector on your phone that’s peeling off on one corner, the bulletin board covered in outdated reminders.
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Sometimes doing a small thing can be extremely satisfying, out of all proportion to how easy it is: placing a jigsaw puzzle piece into the right slot, wiping your phone screen spotless, returning a tool to its designated hook, or making a nice diagonal cut across a lovingly-made sandwich.
This simple kind of satisfaction seems to come haphazardly. Much of the time, you’re barreling through the day, and the tiny actions that make up life mostly seem to be in the way: pushing through a turnstile hoping it doesn’t catch awkwardly, stuffing your phone charger’s prongs into the outlet, trying to get a stack of printer paper to finally settle into the plastic tray.
No matter what your day looks like, life is ultimately made up of a zillion tiny actions: small movements of the hand, foot, eyes, or mind. Whether these actions feel like round pegs slotting into perfect holes, or bushes that scrape you as you push past them, depends less on what the actions are than on how you perform them. If the mind is looking past the current action, to when you’re through the turnstile, or when the printer light is green again, then the action is basically a little pain in the ass. If the mind habitually regards small, necessary actions that way, then life is mostly made of tiny pains in the ass.
Those little actions feel better and more rewarding when the mind stays with the action itself, rather than fixate on what’s just beyond it. If you’re scrambling around in the junk drawer to find the scissors, life feels mildly annoying until you find them, because you just want to get the scissors in your hand and go off to the next thing. If instead you open the drawer, and treat the hunt for scissors as a tiny mission that currently sits at the center of your life, it feels just fine to look for the scissors, and pretty great when you find them. It takes only a very slight effort to do it this way instead – aim your attention at the act itself, instead of beyond — but there’s much less friction and annoyance involved, and something quite satisfying (rather than merely relieving) about completing it.
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