Everything has a cost?

The meter is always running, time never stops, every minute of doing nothing is paid for in the opportunity cost of what you could have been doing instead and there is so much to do that is worthwhile, that is good for you or just fun. It almost seems cruel that we have to sleep at night when there is such a backlog of tasks that we want to accomplish, good intentions that are forgotten by the morning when we just need a cup of coffee to restart the engines and get going. We have the things that we have to do which always take longer than we planned even when we gave ourselves the margin of double the time to do them, jobs have a nasty habit of filling the time we have for them as every writer knows too well, everything has a cost but it depends on our willingness to pay without the certainty of returns on your investment, and those things of the highest value that we aspire to requires everything you have.

There are no such things as part time writers, astronauts, tennis players, if you want to be the best or even just compete with the best, you have to be all in with every fibre of your being, you have to dedicate your life, every thought and action towards that goal because if your don't, some else will, and you have to do so with no guarantees. There is not a participation prize for greatness, there is just failing or winning, it is frightening binary and the worse of it, is that the judgement that matters is yours, you know whether you have succeeded or not by your own standards, by honest self-knowledge, it can not be faked, it is pure undiluted judgement and it is a bitter pill. You have to battle the feeling of whether there is something more you could do and knowing when less is more, you have to build the experience of when you perform at your best and plan your life around it, without exceptions.

That is perhaps why so much greatness is achieved when people are young, when they are free to be completely self-centred, they do not have the responsibilities that come with age, the distractions of relationships, they can join peer groups that have a single focus and mission, they can be one dimensional and sharply focused. Life gets more complicated as you age, the rolling stone meets resistance, it can not fall forever, there is always a valley that it hits because greatness has a price, there comes a point when it is no longer worth paying and there is always someone behind you who is willing to pay more. That is why sports people retire soon after the height of their careers, they either run out of people to beat, prizes to win or they stop wanting to pay the price, and we can all tell when their time has passed, when it becomes a job instead of an all consuming passion, there is a sadness that we feel when someone is phoning it in and relying on the last stores of their skills.

What goes up must come down, and in the end the balance has to be paid, a single focus approach to life has to be brought into alignment, the great chess players in the world have to finally look up from the board and realise that there is more to life than just 32 pieces and 64 squares. Even if they have a lifetime number of combinations, there is more, there are relationships to have, roads to walk, meal to cook and enjoy with friends, or even just the loss of sharpness that age brings that needs to be dealt with, there is always the final game that need to be played and you do not get to win against death. The player always ends up playing against themselves and time will beat them in the end, whatever has been ignored whilst we are on a mission is still waiting for us in the shadows when we return.

However even if you do not have a single focus to your life, if you enjoy many pursuits and you have assets that pay your income, that is not a solution to the problem of endless choice, if anything it is worse, at least the pursuit of greatness limits your choice to a small box of options, you balance your energy with the practise and performance, you work with full intensity and then rest with the same focus and purpose, you always know why you are doing something. The rest of us do not have that guidance and point of reference, we have to make trade offs, play with your ukulele or the kids, go for a walk or tidy the kitchen, watch the final episode or wake up fresh in the morning and there is no way of knowing the right answer, only you know and you only find out if you are right a long time afterwards.

There is the general guide that we are growing beings of consciousness, so that as long as we are growing and developing as human being we are doing something right, we are answering our primal nature that we want to make our world better for us and others, but what that looks like for me is going to be a lot different to anyone else. We are also clever animals so something that general is open to abuse and justification for doing just about anything if you frame it right, not that you can fool yourself in the long run but it can result in very self-destructive behaviour if you are not careful, all treats and no hard work does not make us happy, and it is the hard work that results in long term pleasure and satisfaction but that takes the kind of self-knowledge that is very hard to believe without ever doing the hard work in the first place and seeing the results. Which is the rub, you only know how good it feels once you have done it.

The good news is that it is possible to conduct a lot of low cost experiments to test the directions you want to travel, twenty minutes a day is the perfect habit length to find out what feels good and useful, whilst still making progress in whatever skill or activity you want to try. A twenty minute walk has great health benefits and is pleasurable enough to notice, learning a language, a musical instrument, meditation, reading, kicking a ball, these are all skill that you can develop with a daily routine of practise. You do not have to do them forever, these are experiments, you are not risking your life, just a little of your time and you can see both how progressing in these skills feel and what the process feels like when you are doing them.

As the easiest way to make progress in the long term is finding joy in the process of whatever you are doing, that joy is it's own benefit especially when you are learning something solely for the benefit of your own happiness, that is worth the cost of your time and having more of those things in your life is worth paying for with a little experimenting. We do not have certainty in life except that if you do the same thing everyday you will not produce change in your life, and change is the only certainty, it will happen to you or you will make it happen. However we have the opportunity to direct that change by exploring the possibilities out there, our guide to what is good is joy and if you find something that brings you joy, grab it with both hands, we are always paying with time and joy is the most valuable thing you can buy with it, everything has a cost so decide what you want and pay the price.