Nothing is a Waste of Time
One of my teachers from college had a saying: “nothing is a waste of time — even a waste of time.”
He used to say it in my music lessons when I had failed to write enough music that week. This normally happened as a result of me messing around with some new piece of software, joining an opera chorus, or something similarly eccentric. I often felt guilty when I went into my lessons with less dots on the page than I thought was appropriate for a composer, but I never felt like I had “wasted” my time doing those other things. All that richness of straying into other fields of knowledge always somehow felt right to me.
Looking back, those moments where I “strayed” from my path led to the development of some of my most useful skills. My endless software and data fiddling developed into a career, and I don’t think I would be as comfortable as I am in social situations had I never stepped foot onto an opera stage. But exploring things outside of the norm went beyond just developing an amalgamation of useful life skills — these explorations combined to create my unique perspective on the world.
Thinking about what makes people unique has made me realize just how important everything we think and do really is — even things that are a “waste of time”. Everything we think, do, or experience plays its part in informing our perspective. What makes us different from one another is not only what we each consider important in life, but also what we view as a “waste of time”.
We are perpetually learning. Our minds are always on, always thinking, always making connections between the various stimuli of reality. The only thing that separates a “wise” person from to someone else is how they have consolidated their experiences.
Experiences in life are like bricks. These bricks come in different shapes, colors, and sizes, and we can do whatever we want with them. We can set them apart from one another. We can group similar ones into little piles — we can separate our “work” bricks from our “fun” bricks, and our “enjoyable” bricks from our “boring” bricks. As people, we generally build things using only a portion of the bricks we have at our disposal, and dispose of all the “useless” ones.
But what if we look at our experiences with a grander perspective? We could incorporate all of our bricks into something greater — something that combines all of our experiences into one cohesive expression. We could build something that towers above all other possible structures. The consolidation of our experiences would be infinitely greater and more unique than a few bricks viewed in isolation from one another.
Our ability to consolidate a multitude of experience into a single narrative thread is what denotes true greatness. The materials we are given do not matter nearly as much as what we do with them. Vision is the only thing that separates Babylon from a pile of bricks.
The only difference between a waste of time and a “waste of time” is the depth of our creativity.