That's what my dad always says to me, “we have to do our time, go to school and turn in your work. Go to work and do your taxes, hell maybe do your time in jail I don’t know. You can have fun once you do your time”, and I could hear in his voice, he was waiting to have fun still.
He retired not too long ago; he decided he had done his time. He saw his son grow up, and his daughter go off to college across the country. He battles with my brother to do his time, go to school or work. My mom is doing her time, working. She recently finished school. Everyone is doing time, doing work to get to a point where we don’t have to any more.
We do our time in high school for four years, then sometimes college for two to however many years you really want, then you work until you retire, though some don’t retire. We do our time while we are young and excited and get jaded about life, we start talking about the bills and debt we have by 18 and suddenly we are counting down until we retire before we even start working. So what happens when we start to make the most of our time? When we stop counting down the hours, minutes, moments until the weekend when hit pause on our obligations, what happens?
It’s like that cheesy saying, “if you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I believe that to be true. I believe that when I do things I enjoy like making jewelry that I sell that it really isn’t working. So we find our hobbies, our pastimes, the classes we enjoy that make doing our time easier and less painful. Rather than making this such a long track of four years to years and suddenly stop, take it day by day. Finish the obligations of the day, then do what you want to. Go driving, see a concert, hang out with friends on a garage roof downtown, stop waiting for those years to pass before you do what you want.
Our lives are segments: childhood is playing when we have no real freedom or money but we have time to do what we want, then as teenagers we begin to be able to make money for ourselves and have a bit more freedom, but our time goes down and we realize that $20 isn’t as much as we’d hoped it would be. Then adulthood, something I’m not really at yet, where we don’t have time but we have money (as our hope at least) and freedom, then we retire and we have all these things but we don’t have the energy to climb that hill or the strength to go do something stupid.
I can only hope that I can be like my father, to be able to retire, to be able to go off-roading with my family, to be able to do what I like to and have fun with my life. I aspire to be like my brother and enjoy my days with friends and video games, and to be like my mother who is driven and hardworking. I am still doing my time, I count down until the weekend at university starting 5am Monday, but I am learning to take life day by day rather than the segments we have socially formed. I realized we only have so much time, and I have things I want to do outside of my cookie cutter and small existence.
