Alive time

“Is this going to be dead time or alive time?”

First, I just want to address my writing absence over the weekend. When I started this commitment, my goal was to write every night and if I missed one, I wouldn’t miss two. This became quite a commitment for seven days and it takes a lot out of me late at night, in a good way though as I have been absolutely loving the process of achieving it weekly. But, what I was finding was that it left very little of my time for Amy after our normal chores were done for the night as I would retreat straight to the laptop to start writing and then go to sleep straight after. I decided that during the week when we are heavily on schedule that this will be my priority but come Friday/Saturday/Sunday, my family would become my main priority. So on these nights, if I have something pressing that I simply can not go without exploring, then I will write, or I may even expand into some longer form pieces if the time allows, but my focus will be my family time on these days/ nights.

Now for tonight’s thought.

Ryan Holiday (Author of The Daily Stoic, The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy, among other great work) quite often talks about the difference between alive time and dead time in his blogs and it was something that popped into my head tonight after reading Piper to sleep.

To Ryan, Dead Time is just time that we waste or fill with mindless consumption or sitting around waiting for something to happen to you. Alive Time is time that you purposefully engage with pursuits and goals, a time when you make every second count and when you are learning and growing.

Normally I read for about half an hour, she falls asleep, and then I would scroll on social media for 10-15 minutes until I know she is sound asleep and I leave the room to usually begin writing my nightly entry.

Lately I have been a little disappointed in myself for not keeping up with my meditation and breathing practices as I tell myself “I just don’t have the time to get it in.” There’s a little saying in meditation that if you can’t find the time to do 10 minutes of meditation a day, you need to do 20.

So, as Piper fell asleep tonight and I went to pick up my phone, those words from Ryan Holiday popped into my head and I asked myself “Is this going to be dead time or alive time?”

Seemed like a simple answer after the awareness of my opportunity. 10 – 15 minutes in a completely quiet room with no other distractions….seems perfect. And to think that I have been wasting this time scrolling for months.

I sat for 15 minutes and worked through some nasal breathing practices and let my mind ebb and flow in the directions that it wanted, but all the while bringing myself come back to the breath instead of getting caught up in every thought that crept in.

This put me in a much more focused and fresh mindset to sit down and begin writing this piece when most nights I’m a little sluggish and drained.

Simple question tonight:

What time do you have that you can trade from dead to alive?

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