Free Time

Free time is a terrifying thing. Most people live in abject fear of having nothing to do, no one around, and absolutely no outside influence on which to base their next course of action. It requires a lot of self-awareness in the most basic but complicated sense. What do I want? Am I hungry? Should I eat anyways? Do I really want to read that book? When you are alone a lot, you realize how much you do for other people. You eat because other people are eating, you go out because other people are going out, you watch a movie because people are watching a movie. Often times your activities go to working on the image you want other people to see or how you want to see of yourself. Fortunately, these soul penetrating questions do not last long. This is why I leave the remote close to the bed. I can quickly and efficiently turn off these questions and wait in a sort of purgatory until someone calls for lunch or mountain biking or water basketball or Dinner. TV is a sort of purgatory for you to wait until someone will tell you what to do. You can put off making your own decisions while watching people make bad ones. Few people can live intentionally on their own. Few people can handle having their fate in their hands.


That is why they give their fate to busy schedules. That is why they will go, voluntarily, with out vacation or even a day off. It is easy when we are busy and don't have to think. It is easy to validate your existence when there is always something to be done, regardless of the real worth of the something to be done. True self-worth and self-awareness is evident in people who can live unattached. When their meaning is not tied up in running from one activity to the next and can withstand the piercing stab of self-evaluation that free time forces us to take.