Some days I feel certain that the entity we human beings are meant to understand, beyond all others, is time.

We are like so many students, diligently working away under a grand and ominous ticking clock, striving to learn what it means to spend time wisely, to devote the hours of our lives to worthy causes, and to acknowledge the finite nature of time.

It is this last lesson that is most difficult for us to learn, or to want to learn.

Childhood is about luxuriating in endless sweeps of time and delighting in the exploration of seemingly everything. Adulthood is the refinement of our choices, and implementing the privilege to spend our time as we see fit.

And yet, even when this is true (which it is–we are actually doing what each of us wants to be doing at every moment), we refuse to admit it.

We pretend that we don’t have time to do certain things. We complain about wanting to do those things but being unable to fit them in. But we simultaneously won’t give up the desire or interest that keeps those tasks or activities on our radars.

What we’re most afraid of is admitting that it’s impossible to find time to do the things we don’t truly want to do or care about.

Why is it so difficult for us to just admit that certain things are a priority for us and certain things aren’t? Why is it so unappealing to streamline our pursuits?

I think it’s our innate interest in life, our inherent desire to invest in this thing of being alive. We are merely fulfilling what it is we’ve been created to be and do which is to exist, experience, and evolve.

It is not our fault but our nature, not a denial but an unexpressed desire. We want to do, see, taste, smell, touch, interact with, pursue, learn, give, and create much, much more than one person can reasonably accomplish within the window of time they are given.

This is why we must choose. Painful though it is to sever ties with imagined trajectories and hypothetical realities, we are given just one path to walk in this life. And we can either walk steadfastly, in love with what we have chosen, or we can keep ourselves in the holding pen that is the refusal to boldly choose. We can decide to use our time by following the smallest number of goals that call to us, or we can squander time as we pretend to ourselves that choosing is unnecessary.

Time is our master and our equalizer. It is our teacher and our tool. It is our most precious asset and our most fragile possession. And the sooner we acknowledge that our time is limited, the more urgently we can begin addressing the question of what really matters to us and what ideas we will actually bring into reality.

Counterintuitive though it may seem, it is when we can admit to ourselves that there is no hope of doing it all that our true work begins.