I’m thinking a LOT about time these days. I never seem to have enough of it. My days are gloriously full of activity that I have worked hard, my team has worked hard, to create. And even as I fall asleep, my mind is spinning with lists of all that I didn’t get to or all that I was just inspired to start.

Time is surely our most limited resource.

Have you noticed how the concept of time is reflected in our language? Spending time, wasting time, lost time, investing time, using time, buying time, time is money, etc.

That last one gets close to the heart of it, in a round about way. “Time is money,” is often spoken about the financial cost of inefficient work — but when you think about it more deeply, the way we use time is our most powerful currency. None of us know how many hours/days/years we have in these bodies. How we use our time is how we use our lives.

All of this is coming up for me as our society slowly climbs to the edge of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, so many of us felt frozen, isolated, unable to do the things we wanted to do. This year, we’re in that re-entry phase of doing more, then doing too much, then having to go back to doing less, only to be able to do more. We all hope that soon, either there will be enough of us vaccinated, or enough of us consistently wearing masks and socially distancing, that the yo-yo of activity levels can steady a bit, at least allowing us to more freely gather with our friends.

“Making up for lost time,” is a phrase I’m hearing a lot. This morning, it’s the phrase that was running through my mind as I awoke.

While I’m guilty of occasionally using that phrase myself, this morning, I laughed at it.

Our “COVID time” was not lost. It was spent holding ourselves together. It was spent learning how to hold each other up from a distance. It was spent holding on to hope for better days. Maybe we spent a bit too much of our time eating all that food we bought and prepared while we were in a stay-home-stay-safe mode, or maybe we spent too much of our time sitting on the couch instead of walking or doing all of the exercises we told ourselves we were going to do when we had to stay in our homes (yes, that was a personal admission). But we spent that time. It won’t be ours again. We gave it away, and we gave it away with a goal of getting to the next moment.

Perhaps we call it “lost time” because we didn’t fully realize how we were spending it. I wonder if that’s not the case more often than not? We are frustrated, even angry with COVID and our collective response to it for “taking our time,” but throughout it all, we had choices about what to do with our moments.

The beauty of it all, is that our hours/days/years are still rolling out in unknown quantity before us — and we still have choices about how to spend them.

“It’s about time.” It’s all about how we spend our valuable time. Maybe COVID has taught us, is teaching us, that it’s about time we take the use of our time more seriously.

I’m making breakfast for the man I love, then going to spend time with my tiny garden in this stunningly beautiful day.

How are you spending the currency of this day?