I'm running out of time
There’s a line from the Pixar film “A Bug’s Life” that sticks with me. It’s the scene where you’re first introduced to the circus performers who eventually become some of the story’s heroes. The problem is, they stink, and their audience starts to leave mid-performance. One fly in particular indignantly stands up to leave, declaring, “I only got 24 hours to live, and I ain’t gonna waste it here!” The 24-hour lifespan of a fly is a common myth—house flies actually live about a few weeks. But the mayfly does come close to that lifespan; once it grows out of its underwater nymph stage, it lives only a day or so—24 hours to fly, experience the world, mate, and quickly pass away.
What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?.
I’ve heard people say, “live each day as if it were your last.” That’s dumb; you can’t ‘yolo’ every day and neglect your responsibilities. But I get the point: “Tomorrow is not promised to anyone, young or old alike.” If the unthinkable were to happen today and you’d regret not fixing a relationship or doing something good, get on that now… while you still can.
But it’s more than just avoiding regret, I think.
My mission president urged us missionaries not to keep track of the time on our missions. Ammon didn’t think of his mission as a set number of transfers. He told Lamoni, “I desire to dwell among this people for a time; yea, and perhaps until the day I die.” So we were invited to throw away any countdown calendars, “forget ourselves, and go to work.” He would send us each a personal letter on our year marks, and that was to be our sole guide for time. When members asked how long we’ve been out, we were to say “a little under a year” no matter how green we were, and “a little over a year” even if we were going home the next day. His goal was to create a sense of timelessness to break down stigmas against greenies, keep the new missionaries from feeling discouraged by the long slog ahead, and keep the seasoned missionaries from getting “trunky” at the end.
It was good advice… but I learned not to take it. For some context, I love missionary work. Ever since I can remember, my greatest dream in life was to be a missionary. Ever since I got home, my dream has been to get back out there as a senior missionary as soon as I can and for as long as I can. My wife teases that she wanted to marry a returned missionary, but I still haven’t really “returned” yet. I treasured those two years. Every day I got to wake up and put on a name tag that identifies me as an official representative of the Church of Jesus Christ and spend the whole day sharing about it. What could be better than that! I knew how two years could pass away in the blink of an eye, and I was determined not to waste a single hour of it (often to the great annoyance of my companions). So, when things got tough, and I’d knocked on 500 unanswered doors in a day and I felt discouraged, I would do exactly what my mission president told us not to do: I tallied the days in my head as motivation: “What am I doing feeling sorry for myself? I don’t have time for that; I only have 562 days left until this once-in-a-lifetime experience is gone! There’s no time to lose; I gotta get back to work!”
The past few years, however, I’ve lost a lot of that internal steam. Some days with four kids it just feels like such a slog. My wife and I sometimes just look at each other, then at the clock on the microwave, then back at each other. We don’t need to say anything. We both know we’re calculating how many more hours of constant fighting we have to deal with before the kids’ bedtime. Not exactly the kind of time-treasuring I did on my mission. The past few years, I’ve felt… I don’t know… like I’m just drifting—surviving life but not really living it with intentionality.
And so I’ve started doing what I did on my mission: trying to develop perspective. Just as I chomped at the bit to go on a mission when I was a kid, I know I chomped at the bit to come to earth and serve my mission here. In fact, I (and you and everyone else) “sang together and shouted for joy” at the prospect. And like my mission, I know that I’ll look back on this time of mortality and realize just how short it really was. As Pres. Nelson taught, “Mortal lifetime is hardly a nanosecond compared with eternity. But, my dear brothers and sisters, what a crucial nanosecond it is!” For some perspective, a nanosecond is one billionth of a second. To put it in perspective, in one second, light can circumnavigate the globe 7.5 times. In one nanosecond, light travels less than a foot. It’s unimaginably short. And that’s how we will look back on mortality when we’ve crossed the veil and our premortal memory is restored.
So what kick in the pants could I use today like I used on my mission? How about another ticking clock?
Actuarial tables predict the “median Matthew Watkins” will kick the bucket on Sunday, August 27, 2073. And thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can see a real-time countdown to the second:
A therapist might not sanction this as the healthiest mental exercise, but I invite you to try it out, too. As the psalmist prayed, “teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” There’s no time to lose. In the same “nanosecond” talk, Pres. Nelson reflected on the perspective he gained at the end of almost a century of life. In words that touched me, he explained why he was spending such precious final moments of his “nanosecond” speaking to us:
I have lived a long time, and at this point, I have stopped buying green bananas! And I have also stopped spending time on things that don’t matter. But you do matter to me! And your future matters much to me!
And of course we can’t talk about “things that don’t matter” without bringing up… social media. We know it’s not an effective use of our time, yet so many of us (myself included) spend way too much time on it. But I’ve noticed an encouraging trend: people are signing off. I’m not the only one to notice this. Matt Whitman (host of the Ten-Minute Bible Hour, great guy) observed this a few days ago. I thought his words were profound and encapsulated my own feelings well, so I’ll share them here (link):
The people I know who think about their life, who take stock of what’s going on, who number their days, and are sobered by the “numbering of their days,” are gravitating away from social media…
I feel vile guilt when I squander time on social media. I feel self-loathing. [I think,] “What have you done? Your kids are in the house. You could have affirmed your beautiful wife and given her a lift that would carry her through the day or the whole week with less thought than you put into the words of that Twitter post. A gift you could have given so effortlessly, but you didn’t. You hung out with these people who are 51% bots. What are you doing, Matt? That’s not numbering your days. That’s not being reflective.”
I feel great when a week goes by and I dip into the world of social media a little bit, take its temperature, and go back to what I’m doing [but] I feel sick, I feel gross when I spend too much time. At my worst, I’m starting to feel paralyzed when I’m there too long.
It’s like the white lotus in Greek mythology. The lotus makes you forget time. You forget what’s going on. It’s like what a casino tries to be. And I just lose time and lose the ability to do anything because I feel this existential dread when I’m on social media that “so much is already being done. I don’t need to do anything. What’s the point?”
I don’t feel that very often, but when I do, I shake myself out of it and spit the lotus out of my mouth [and say] “Wake up, dude. What are you doing? Turn this crap off. Get it out of your life!”
Social media. Video games. Sports. There’s a white lotus in my life and yours. I gotta work on spitting mine out. Because I’m running out of time. And you are, too.
