Our Most Valuable Commodity

My doctoral adviser at UCLA, the late and brilliant Dr. James Bruno, was diagnosed with cancer and given 18 months to live–ten years before I met him. Dr. Bruno, quite frankly, didn’t feel like dying. Instead, he chose to live every moment, treating the time he had as the most valuable commodity in the world. So why, in an age during which technology has, literally, compressed objective time into shorter periods of ‘subjective time,’ do we not do the same?

What is the fundamental purpose of technology? Think for a second before you answer. It is not to make our lives easier or better; it is to make our lives more efficient or faster. We don’t need to mail letters anymore or wait until we get home to make phone calls. Heck, we don’t even have to watch commercials anymore, now that “Tivo” and “DVR” are verbs.

To be fair, technology has bettered portions of our lives; with that, we cannot argue. I can see my beautiful niece while speaking to her from her home in Orange County, obtain information at lightning speed, even delegate work tasks to be completed overnight by individuals in different countries who are operating within different time zones. But, we still can’t argue that all of these examples trace back to speed. Simply, we can do things faster, now, and the objective 60 minutes of the 1950’s has now been compressed into a subjective 90 minutes in 2011, because we can get 50% more work completed in the same, objective amount of time. It’s time to slow down and appreciate time with our families, our friends, even ourselves.

Dr. Bruno gave me a goal before he passed: Set an income at which I would be comfortable; then, instead of incessantly trying to achieve more and more, to endeavor incessantly to work less and less to maintain it, as time is, after all, our most valuable commodity. We need to release ourselves from the lure that Los Angeles and American culture has created. I urge you to slow down, to take Dr. Bruno’s advice, as I have, and set your intentions upon a possibly alternative goal, one that, upon reaching, enables you to enjoy every moment and feed your will to live.

Our work may define us in some way, shape, or form, if we are lucky, can define our work around who we are. But, in the end, it does not sustain our will to live or our beings. So, next time you feel that there is not enough time in the day to accomplish your tasks, slow down, take a deep breath, take a yoga class (anywhere…just take one), play with your dog, hug your child; just remember that, while we can always seek to make one more dollar, we can never get time back.

Brad Burnam

brad@burnyogaLA.com

Owner, Burn Yoga