Wasted Time

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, according to Amnesty International. It is argued that sleep is more essential than food, but it may be even more important than water. In the fictional TV series Away, a crew of astronauts on a mission to Mars wondered what it would be like dying of thirst: dehydration, one of the scientists aboard argued, it may not be as horrible. Sleep deprivation, though, does not paint a pretty picture: in just under a week, the sleep-deprived brain stops working altogether and the damage may be permanent. You may suffer a heart attack and cancers will occur all over your sleep-deprived system. Sleep may be more essential than water in many respects, it is a mechanism built-in, unlike water. You may feel hungry or thirsty, and as a consequence go looking for it; sleep, on the other hand, comes to you no matter where you are: it will find you.

If you were to think of an ideal scenario that may facilitate sleep, you’ll probably think of quietude, a comfortable bed, cool but not cold temperature. There's a correlation between a good relationship and a good neighborhood, in that there is a sense of calm, safety, and cool warmth. No place, just like no person is devoid of complete commotion. When patterns are chronic, when dramatic episodes occur regularly, then the quality of life can be drastically diminished. Pervasive, recurrent behavior or circumstances appear accidental but rarely are.

For sleep comfort, a dark cool room, silence, a good mattress would do the trick. Temperature is key, not too abrasively hot nor despondently cold, sort of like a partner who may raise their voice without the need to turn every infraction into a shouting contest not shout in a time of crises. A correlation between a good night's sleep and a good life may be observed. Watch out for the kind of lover you sleep next to, otherwise your night, no matter how well planned, can be ruined. Similarly, when you have a noisy neighbor, sleep suffers and, consequently, you suffer. The minute sleep is taken out of the equation, a measured decline in the quality of life surfaces. The idea that many of us sacrifice sleep at the expense of a movie makes life joyless, it is a decision that impacts the rest of your day, like that of not going to the gym.

Sleep is about quality, as good things in life are about balance, equilibrium. Working out too is about balance, and requires little to give its magic. Who doesn’t have a few minutes a day to see and feel and be better? It’s simple math: your blood flows, and it gets to every part of you, senses are heightened, drive, and motivation increase. You become a better you.

An intense workout, ideally between ten and forty minutes, any more or any less of that is unnecessary. If you haven’t done what you need in forty minutes, either you don’t know what you’re doing or you’re doing other than just working out. And, yeah, a lot of people end up staying longer at the gym, just because it feels good, and the more you do it, the better. 

But then again, people are not just there to work; some go there to show off, others as a way of life, and some because it is an addiction, and others because they have poor self-esteem, and yet some because they want to look good or impress someone, or made a commitment to lose weight. Whatever the itch, it takes less than a minute to change our state of mind. And you don’t need a gym for it, either, but it helps. Provided that you use that minute wisely, to hold a couple of challenging yoga postures, to do as many push-ups as you can, or to hold your breath for as long as you can, the mind may be transformed from a couch potato into a go-getter in a moment. None of this is possible without sleep. You may have a bad night, but poor sleep habits will haunt you and take a toll on you eventually. Nothing’s quite as important and ironically downplayed, lack of sleep ages us; it has us in this frenzied state of mind where everyone is at each other’s’ throats. Stress is the culprit. For if it is considered briefly, the noise makes a startling difference in the quality of the neighborhood one lives in. And not only makes noise a bad neighborhood, but it also makes it to the metro on the way to work. It seems that the cool thing is to be constantly entertained, if not enraged, anything’s more preferable than idleness. And yet, little time is made for the absence of thought which can result when we engage ourselves in activities that foster well-being, like meditation, sleep, exercise, and perhaps more important than all of this combined nutrition. Sleep may be more vital than food but the quality of life in life, other than living for others, is in the quality of our food. Altruism is an upgraded version of selfishness, you do good because it feels good. 

We may overdo it too, and though doing good for others is more than selflessness, it feels great to be kind. We are wired for empathy, but more importantly: empathy reinvigorates us, not only does it make us feel good but it is also good. No one’s proud of getting angry, it doesn’t feel good, unlike kindness, or forgiveness for that matter. Arguably, to forgive is selfish in essence, the good that derives from doing so shows. To forgive is something we do for ourselves. And it has nothing to do with being selfish. There’d be plenty of opportunities to be ungrateful, lazy, inebriated, tedious, unfocused, impatient, and hopefully, we can all agree no one should enjoy any of these. But we all must go through them at one point or another.

When we are grateful, relaxed, joyous, content with just sitting still and doing absolutely nothing, such as in meditation, you find that the carefree and comfort experienced in getting along with people, being polite, it may be seen as suspect conduct. Especially in a city like New York, where everyone runs around stressed-out, always busy, with little, if any, time to extend the courtesy. If anything, people are eager to share just the unpleasantness brewing inside. You only need to take a ride on the subway, that is what they call what in other metropolitan cities call "metro". Early in the morning, you see the sleepless, tiresome faces, maybe getting over a hangover or a girlfriend, if only they could get over the day that has just begun. 

You can't blame them. Sleep is sacrificed for smartphone time, even now you can see people that see one another everyday unsuspectingly in the mornings, same gruesome, somber faces returning home, ten hours ago, and not a minute away from their phones. At home, too, you can see family members prefer time alone with their cell devices. How can we feel up to it, if most of the time is spent doing stuff we hate? No one likes their job, but they have to do it to pay the bills, smartphone alone over $100 monthly, rent money which takes a third of the money you make and another third in child support, day in and out. Whatever little is left, it requires keeping up the charade, clothes, vices, dating, with little money left to put away. 

And if you do manage to put some away, as I did for fifteen years, one day your 401K disappears after passing from one investment firm to another with no one to give any reason as to where your money did go, as it happened to me. Am I the only one suffering this? No, but it's one of those things that you don't believe it does until it happens to you. 

Little of our time really belongs to us. Getting to like, then progressing into maybe loving what we do. To make the best of a situation we find ourselves in requires just a keen imagination and little, if any, effort. Instead of hoping, planning about the future, passively fantasizing or deflecting the reality. Courage is like gravity, an invisible force that pulls things towards one another, an attraction of sorts. It is a weak force, as in it takes the whole earth to pull down to earth, keeping us from drifting into the beyond. Be the star at the center, with celestial bodies seemingly afloat in your midst, kept in place by your gravitational pull. Really seeing ourselves immersed in the unique moment that unfolds before us, the present serves as an anchor. We got time to create in this space in time we call “now”, all the possibilities that lie ahead. And so, it is not just about being “at the right moment” but also in the “right state of mind”, and thereafter seizing the infinite potentialities that can materialize out of thin air, if we take life with a sense of wonder and direction. The stirring of the wheel will definitely land us into a wondrous shift, all it takes is a swift twist of the wrist and a decisive grip. The things that we dream of lie wide awake at our disposal if only we have the eyes to see and the heart to follow. No matter how diminished an insight, it is second-guessing our impulses, refraining from a wreck-train of thought, and reevaluating our approach that makes breakthroughs possible, challenging the status-quo or gradually improving the result. It doesn’t make us perfect but it makes us perfectionists, as in wanting to make things better still, yet knowing that the process by which things are made so never ends. It’s what the great Tony Robbins once deemed “CANI”, an acronym for constant and never-ending improvement, which we may yet still perfect to “CI”: Constant improvement.

It’s not easy, but of course, it is made harder if we don’t have quality sleep, eating a diet high in fats, sugars, and sodium, or if we don’t have work out. You feel the way you eat and if you eat crap, then it’s no wonder you’ll feel crappy. If all you do is drink coffee, or go on cigarette breaks, or wait until the next time you get to venture out and drink with your friends, it is the addiction. 

Drugs change the way our minds work, and though we should from time to time enjoy more than our share of drinks and food, life’s chaos is inherent in everything, and the more we do things that do not foment our well-being, the more miserable we are. It’s simple math: feelings are not spontaneously created. You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who eats nutritiously, sleeps well, meditates often… being miserable. It doesn’t mean life will be thrilling, in fact, the opposite: take away the thrills, and deal with the boredom of this moment without any external commodities. The more your joy lies in your hand, the better off you are. It is not happiness but the joy we should seek. We should seek to meditate away the fear of being by ourselves, doing whatever it is we are here to do, and doing it often. We will make mistakes, of course. But we’ll have so much time in our hands, especially since we don’t have to nurse any hangovers. People who drink find it strange when someone doesn’t drink, especially when drinking. Everyone drinks, how frequently is in what they differ.

Abstinence usually happens with individuals who cannot handle alcohol well, or have a dependence on it, or are sick otherwise or because of it. Others, like myself, have drastically reduced drinking. Ideally, 2–3 units, 2–3 times a month. I have had delegated drinking alcohol on vacation, but then I discovered that not drinking stretched time. It perhaps had to do with not having to nurse hangovers. Think: not only do you need to make time to drink, after all, you can’t do much else while drinking, but also you’re out of commission for a few hours before unexpectedly waking up late in the night only to find yourself unable to go back to sleep; then, wake up to an unpleasant morning where noises are magnified, headache, dizziness, dehydration… you may recoup faster if you’re more used to it. So, that’s an unpleasant byproduct of reducing alcohol intake: you end up dreading the decision to have done it in the first place. The mixed baggage of fun and the volatile spell of randomness that the alcohol trip embarks us on is not worth its ticket price. It just happens to be the cheapest neurotoxin readily available for mass consumption. What do you do then? With all the time in the world, you do nothing more than rejoice: it is the absence of pain that we really should strive for in life.

It is not nearly as enjoyable as it was, and the older I get, the less fun it is. Instead, I ask myself, how come I waited this long to feel the mint gift of sobriety, the goodness of waking up hangover free. Alcohol ages you. It is a bit weird if you look closer, the morning after drinking, staring back at you in the mirror. Remember to have compassion with yourself: you’re looking at it from a dehydrated brain. The night after feels like a thousand nights have fallen upon us, and at the neurological level, there’s been a massive depletion of brain cells, disruption in their ability to sync and process, so the eyes you used to see may paint a blurred depiction of yourself, the one staring back from the mirror. Consider, too, that there’s no “mirror”, and that the eyes, as well as the mind, deceive us each moment of the day. It may be that the brain does not trust the visual information wholeheartedly, that any instance of solace is followed by more bad news. So, you’re in a constant state of vigilance, no one knows how to shut off this fight-or-flight response on the fly, but everyone can agree: it is possible to deescalate the situation, that the minute we choose to push the breaks may not mean that the speed in which we’re driven will collapse instantaneously, no. In effect, it takes a few moments for the mind to catch itself, and you can compose yourself momentarily, if not immediately. Seeing things unfold and decelerating before escalating, even better. Knowing that alcohol is a destructive neurotoxin that obliterates our brainiac potency overtime, helps too. Having drunk alcohol is all the proof you need, if you’re a clever fellow, to know the less, the better. Infused with plants crushed with ice in a blender, a green veggie drink with a splash of vodka may be the perfect midway path, so long as the plant and the ice make upwards of 90% of the equation. 

Have more than you should and risk thinking now you know how to dance. Or feeling confident that you are okay to drive since you’ve only had a couple of drinks is what makes us all wish for the advent of self-driven cars. If you think the smart ones hail a cab or call an Uber, then what’s left for the one brilliant one that decided to drink only water at the party? Or the genius who decided to forgo the whole party scene and instead snuck in early to sleep. Time, the thing you most value or should anyway, is all you really have quantified, and if you want any meaning and comfort while alive, you should aim at quality and not of the quantity you’ve got. Alcohol screws with you: you can get horny and have diminished sexual potency. It makes some a smoker while drinking, like your servant here truly. In my case, it wasn’t a problem until I hit my late thirties, the more I drank, the less imposing my erectile penis felt, if you add cigarettes to the mix. So, why not eliminate two holes in a single shot? It happened accidentally, when my interest incidentally was to quit smoking: I noticed, I could relapse if I decided to drink heavily and though it wasn’t a problem to go back to being a nonsmoker the morning after, especially after the severity of the hangover, hardened by the inclusion of nicotine, it astounded me that alcohol had the power to undermine the imperative of being smokefree. In fact, if I wanted to quit smoking, something I never really saw as “quitting”, as the term infers a loss, then I had to diminish alcohol consumption. At least until I felt like I could have a few beers and not feel the urge to smoke. But if I overdid it, even by a drink, and if there were smokers (which there always were and oh so happy to comply with your request so long as you can join them and feel that you never really left), I often ended up smoking. Many times, I’d contemplate how it was an uphill battle, so I decided for a while to cut down on alcohol. It didn’t take long before I noticed how my creativity and mood, my eating and sleeping cycles, my overall performance, and well-being, increased. If a few days feel good, I imagine what a few weeks may be like. So, gradually, and increasingly so, I drank and smoked less and less.

Think of it this way, every action has to use your mind, and alcohol uses you. Your mind is no longer yours. It is hard to conceive of this unless it is tried and seen for yourself. If you were forced to be sober, you’ll be thankful in the end. And wanting to quit cigarettes for good did so inadvertently, I cut down on drinking and it felt so good that I wanted more and more of that sobriety bliss. Were a group of friends or relatives to show up, bring music, food and drinks, I’d keep the music. I’d imagine what it’d be like if those present sat in place comfortably and immerse themselves full blast into a meditative state, keep fasting instead of overeating, and play New Age music instead of reggaeton. The reason we chase after highs is that we despise the lows to which we succumb once the highs pass, and you can see how that’s a vicious, unsustainable cycle. You ought to detoxify, alkalinize and hydrate, breathe in deeply and fully, exhale slowly, drink only water, and have a lively diet. What we deem “boredom” is only so if coupled with anxiety. Anxiety is the driver, the uneasiness that underlines every whim. We can override it by getting in touch with the vacuum within, that vortex of contrasts that is our mind, and quench our thirst for more with the relentless gift of pace. It is a form of “pacing”, of little steps that add up. You pace before starting to accelerate or to decrease speed, and pacing yourself adds life to the allotted time you have left. Everywhere and in all directions, you find yourself in and with the desire to “out” it. It doesn’t come naturally to sit and be idle, but the status quo of ceaseless action and motion steer us from the objective. We are here to grace, to rejoice in each other’s company, to actively pursue the connections that give life meaning. Do have your fun, but moderately. You find one day that whomever it was that you were when a night out drinking seemed like a good idea is no longer around. It may seem strikingly odd at first glance to picture yourself in a dim spotlight with inebriated strangers, late at night when you should be falling asleep.

So, what is it that we need even more than sleep? Or even air? It is time. It is an illusion, to conceive of time as something finite, but an illusion makes it no less real. It matters how we perceive something, for if we weren’t acute to the perception of time, we would not fare well. The reason humanity got this far is not that we are all bad apples; to the contrary, we collaborated. Our strength is in numbers, and so I find myself as a rare specimen, not a role model just lucky, I suppose. Having found meditation is a gift. And so, from there came all others. 

I have been meditating since my midteens, the habit started as I read a book in Spanish about the subject. Well-written, objective, and poignant, the book took a historical look firstly, then moved on to the science behind it, and then it moved on to ways how to meditate. Meditating, the time comes to a standstill, the more you meditate the younger you become, literally speaking. Think of how beneficial it is to be in a state of bliss. Such is the state that meditation if done properly, and not that it is hard to grasp either. Everyone meditates differently, but roughly the idea is to cease all thoughts. Sitting, or laying down, you disengage from the inner chatter inside us. You sort of deal with the anxiety of having to sit and deal with yourself. You leave that self of yours on the side. You become okay within. Your breath, your words shorten; life is enhanced.

If there’s anything you will do, and continue to need to do, so much so that it really isn’t up to you, nature did not leave it up for a choice to breathe. You do so the minute you start before you learn how to speak. No one taught you how to breathe. You can learn how to do it properly. In a breath, you’ll find life at its core. So long as you are to breathe, do so fully and gently, and in it, you’ll find that time slows down and life expands, and you stand still motionless in blissfulness. Meditation, I’ve written off as a bad name. It is more like a state of blissfulness.

A state of bliss, a perpetual calm. It is the only thing that the more you do, the better. So, I do it as often as I can, no less than several times a day. I control my breathing, try to make it fully and deeply, slower. It seems real that the passage of time is slowly killing us, but when you rush through life because of it being short, you shorten yours, you may increase the likelihood of disease, so what good is it to mask the anxiety of life. We live in fear, and we cover it overdrinking, overeating, overdoing it. Sure, no one’s denied, and from time to time we should all indulge. It just seems that too much of a good thing can be bad. For instance, not enough money may be as bad as too much of it. But you’ll find the human spectrum in the extremes if things are out of whack. Time is what matters, and of that, we cannot make more.In scientific circles, there’s always talk about a subject that just a few decades ago seemed to be more science-fiction: to live longer. Longevity has been in humanity’s collective imagination throughout history, all the major religions in the world more or less deal with the denial of our own mortality. All of the religions we know of dealt more or less with the problem, some offered solutions, most notably that of a paradise, or that death is but an illusion. Death as an illusion rings truest, though. It is an illusion to think that we can somehow claim back what we’ve lost; what we can do, instead, is to keep what we have for long. No one will give us back this moment. No matter how much energy and commitment we put into a task, it is not giving it our all but giving up the pretense that we should prove somehow ourselves to the world. We are something special, and some of us fail to realize so, just how lucky we are for being here. Somehow that’s not enough, we need validation and status, go after the mirage of materialism. Don’t get me wrong, I like stuff. I just don’t need more than enough. When you come from little, something will do. And so is with our lives, that to enjoy we need not more than to marvel at the awesomeness of our condition. It helps if you do so through a rigorous meditative session, throw in a little yoga to kick, especially if it’s a fasting day. Oh to live to breathe in and twist yourself into ridiculous forms, to let your hair grow like a hippie and… okay, I deviate from the subject. 

It is not time we “lost”, it was just time ill-spent. It makes it seem like we need to rush and experience life, party before the time’s up. And it is all the partying, and the sleepless nights that follow, the hangover the day after. Joy comes as a way of seeing through the hazy lenses that those who stand to profit want you to see through. We are not so poor as we are wasteful. What good is a life extended by a hundred if you’re going to suffer all the way there? How long is not what matters; it matters only how well. And the question of wellness has to do with our choices in a healthy lifestyle. It generally means, the things we eat, the quality of sleep, the habits we nurture throughout life matter. No amount of wealth can supplant it.

We cannot claim back the time we lost. But we can stretch the amount we’re given. Asking “What Time is”, a rhetorical question, is a lot like asking “Where is Time right now?” Or, “And where was Time right now a moment eons ago?” It’s not like we can photograph it and put it on a fridge in one of those calendars back in the day. Time is within us, it fits as the perfect analogy to us as one thing, the stars, the oceans, all down to a grain of sand. In a grain of sand, a universe.

A few years ago, not a lot of people knew what a punch-hole smartphone was, and to think that we choose the friends and family in our lives is, to an extent, an illusion. We end up loving others with the same tools that the architects of our childhood devised, whether it was a married couple, or a teacher, perhaps a commercial, all of those early influences, and only if those who were in our early lives did care to pass down anything worth remembering. It may be that we follow along with the crowd, though we know it may not be an ideal path. And even to express dissent is an offense, but why complain and spend the time on either camp? One cannot have enough and the other doesn’t have much, but there’s perhaps a middle ground, not having much can be good. There’s compassion because we know we need one another, but if we grow out of that dependence, then it’s easier to downplay other people’s misery. We can do a lot more, but not more than we should, and sometimes push and others pull. But the thing at hand is suffering. 

For any living organism, there’s no escape from suffering. It is how it signals that something is amiss, that a wrong has to be rectified. Suffering will happen, regardless; what matters is what you suffer for. What the great psychologist Carl Jung called "legitimate suffering," the kind that is meant to make us grow. Say you fear taking a bold step, you much rather play it safe, then you'll suffer your indecision like a slow death, a sort of torture that lasts for as long as you keep up the charade. If instead, you choose the noble path, you'll suffer greatly but since it is for the right cause, your cause, then it'll be worth it. Like the awesome dramatist, William Shakespeare once said: "A coward dies a thousand deaths; a brave man only once." 

We choose to materialize dreams, the sooner and the bolder our approach, the better our reward... but it’s our imagination as well that fills in the blindspots of an idealized situation. Lighten your touch, you need not brazenly set fire to brighten the path nor expect that a candle will suffice. A torch or a well-oiled lantern will do. It gradually dawns on you: this reality is made up, the one that you live day and day out. The days, these too are fabrications that we allow to dictate our lives when with a swift move you can make in a moment the difference that others will second-guess their lives away contemplating. They'd rather talk bravely to themselves, like a lonely lion in a cage, but they no longer roar or roam the wild savannah like the beast that sleeps in dreams of. We lost so much in the process of domestion, civilized beasts, sad remnants of our wild ancestry. 

It is an illusion, and it doesn’t make it any less real. One can see the hypnotic experience of watching a good film in a movie theater, the observer is not focused on the pixels involved in making the picture resolution, none of these things matter; the fact that nothing is really happening, yet we feel a sense of urgency, it shows that our mind can be easily tricked. 

Take a look at everyone around, their faces will show: mass hypnosis. The reality that you accept is imaginary, if there are any fantasies that you feel like adding up you do so in the privacy of your mind. No one needs to know more than that, what is shown, and what they expect of us in every situation. We have to live and therefore deal with others, some of whom will be close, but most likely strangers. Even us, when it comes to our own selves, remain strangers in bond. No matter how many of our desires come true, we will never stop wanting, desiring, or needing. There’s no escape to this cycle, in the meantime, we devise ways to combat boredom like social media, our friends online. It used to be that you had to page someone and get a call back sometime later, or not. Now you know they don’t want you, or if they do, it’s pretty clear too. How come we have at our disposal an excellent device to bond with one another, but feel, if not more, just as alone as before.

Technology isolates us. Not in a metaphorical way, no. But in a way that is not just unhealthy, but kind of Frankenstein-ish. Say that it is in the interest of a very powerful entity to control the conversation between, say, two individuals. The only way that those individuals will ever notice if there’s any miscommunication is when they actually meet and talk, and it doesn’t have to happen physically. A simple phone call would do. If it can be said, don’t send it in a text. Call me. Let’s not rely too much on communication that can be easily manipulated, like solely relying on text or instant messages. We can use video communication which is far more personal than texting. Texting requires writing and you guys suck as writers. Even good writers suck at it. We can infer so much more by simply staring into each other’s eyes. And yes, do so with people you’d rather see, not just hear from. We all have people we’d like seeing and people we’d like knowing, sometimes we have people we want both seeing and hearing from. Meaningful contact, that is.

Technology is about happiness, but happiness can become addictive. To be fair, anything we enjoy doing and do often can become addictive. It is only when addiction interferes with our daily routine when it becomes so absorbing that it begins to cause problems for us. Think of things that you make “happy”, and you’ll probably come up with activities, people, substances, everything to do with external influences. Of course, you may find that you enjoy your company, but happiness is about doing, especially in our culture, not about being. Be more like a mountain, so full of life, something to be discovered, a spectacle at plain sight, buzzing with sounds yet such immense quietude.

Comments? Write me at:

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