Life Energy

Finished reading "Your money or your life" last week and it got me thinking. (Note: it's a worthwhile read but some of the details seemed a bit tedious for my detail impared mental capacity.)

Anyway, one of the exercises discusses evaluating money and the amount of life energy (we only have a limited amount of time on earth) required to get it. I've realized, yet again, that similarly, we only have a certain amount of life energy for which to budget during our daily/weekly/monthly lives. For example, a month only has 720 hours in it. Of those, we spend, give or take, 240 hours sleeping. Of the remaining 480 hours in a month, nearly 200 are spent working (or getting to/from work, getting ready for work, or taking lunch at work). So, that leaves about 280 hours, per month, for everything else (cooking, eating, cleaning, relaxing, family time, taking care of kids, errands, etc). Add in a part-time weekend job, and daily, non-allocated time drops to a couple hours a day, tops.

It's a bit sobering to look at just the time constraint on our lives. The next ingredient to add in is actual energy required to do all these things and then some, especially if "and then some" includes training for and competing in athletic competitions.

It then becomes imperative, with the small window of time and energy available, to focus our life energy on only a few things, in order to get some return on our investment. The key is to determine what "things" to focus on and which to say "farewell". That's my dilemma now. I want to be so many things, to do many things well, but the older I get, the more I realize how impractical that is, and how some of my things compete against each other for life energy.

I don't mean for life energy to be some quasi mystical idea. It's actual a very real concept...think about it. It takes both life and energy to do things, it's just a matter of how much. I guess the exercise that should now follow this realization is to go through my life and determine which things rob life energy from those things that I want to spend it more on. (Example: most endurance training I do requires time away from my family, but if I want to spend more time with my family, I need to cut back the amount of time I spend away. Obvious, you say, but it does require a major resetting of goals and ambitions and decisions on where to spend the limited amount of time and energy we have. The same scenario can be said about work, spending time with friends, or any other of a host of habits we have.)

This post, I guess, is then a prelude to some self-examination and prioritizing of activities that consume life energy. I would imagine, then, that at the end of the exercise, there are some things I put away for a while, until a time in which I have more free time???