I recently started reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. There are plenty of articles and interviews to read about the book and the author, so I won't bore you with details you can find better written elsewhere. I do want to share a recent self discovery as it relates to the book's material.
I have lived by the following quote for what seems like about the past ten years: "Time you enjoy is never wasted." I forget where I heard that quote first. At this point, I may have said it so many times that a historian may credit me with creating the phrase. I think it's still relevant to my outlook today. Thanks to the message I'm picking up from Four Thousand Weeks, I'd offer an even simpler take: "Time is never wasted."
Time is never "wasted", at all, because it can't ever really be "spent" as if it's a currency that you can have more or less of at any given instant. (How would it even be possible to "have" time in an instant?) Time is it. That is, your experience, any given moment in which you can exist, is time. The accumulation of moments appears to be a unidirectional and linear flow of time for how we "pass through it". Really, instead of thinking of time as some currency, it's more like an integral from calculus.
All the moments you've experienced, in "deep time" as some call it, make up your life, sum into this integral. No measure of years, months, days, minutes, seconds, or smaller, can accurately and consistently describe this accrual. If, for instance, you spent a year grieving, you'd probably accrue many fewer moments to remember because of being in a lower energy state, but you'd "have" plenty of time to reflect on past moments. That year will not have gone any faster or slower by scientific measures. It may feel a lot slower from the lack of punctuated events in life. But it'd be ample time to review the story told so far, a fine activity in this lower energy state. (All this, I should add, requires ample rest. No need to force oneself into accruing more memories. There's no room for that in this state.)
Don't worry too much about "being fully in the moment" or "being here now". You're always now, and you're always here. There's no way to do it "right" or "wrong". You might remember some moments better. Those are the ones to reflect on and appreciate anyway.
Thank you for "spending" your time to read this blog post. Maybe it bored you or scared you in thinking about time an unconventional way. Maybe you had an enjoyable moment.