wasting time - kill your heroes

note: featuring samples from jackjames_tomknevitt, straget, and SweetNeo85. apologies to Claude Debussy.

wasting time

I am a very patient person. I’ve suffered fools gladly for years. I have taken shit from shitbags, been a faithful lieutenant to every captain, a Robin to every Batman, placated and polished the egos of every visionary leader to have graced every organisation I’ve been at, if it meant getting ahead in life.

I see progress as linear, an open track running to The Top™. No twists or turns, no detours or diversions. You go forward or you go backwards, that’s it. Paying your dues is part of the journey, and I’ve done all the crowd pleasing, compliment fishing, arse licking, cowardly diplomatising, yes man business necessary to get there.

The Top™ is home now, and like with all homes, I intend to make it my own. I say I am a very patient person… well, I’ve been patient enough. Now it’s my turn, I’m doing what I want, how I want. I didn’t reach The Top™ just to be miserable! I’ve gotten into the philosophy of hedonism recently. In the spirit of renowned thinker Kim Cattrall, I don’t want to be in a situation for even a minute where I am not enjoying myself. So now I give anyone who wants it up to 59 seconds of my time to start with; bore me one moment longer, and I will depart their company. And if they dare to question why, I tell them I am dying and that I will count every single second more of my time wasted as a direct cause of my premature death in a post mortem which will apportion their share of the blame accordingly.

We must start billing idlers for the social irresponsibility of wasting other people’s time. If the police can do it as a criminal sanction — and they seem to have far more spare time than anyone else — then I can definitely charge people with the same thing done to me. Your time may be of no importance, but my time comes at a premium; I can’t get away with losing minutes here and there to meetings where we mumble through the things that could have been sorted over email; I’m not having it anymore! The one I had just last Friday was the last straw. One hour into a 45-minute pre-meeting I was assigned to chair as I turned up, I lost my mind. Many people say their lives have flashed before their eyes in moments of nigh fatal risk. But your life goes before your eyes every waking second anyway, it’s just that most of the time it more drags than flashes. As was the case in this pre-meeting… *sigh*…

I was staring idly at the wall clock before me, which was ticking with its usual metronomic certainty, my eyes daring it to fail, to do something that would throw all humanity for a loop, plunging us into chaos, any distraction to drag me away from the inane chatter of targets, KPIs, SWOT analyses, and such and such and such, endless thrumming to flatten one’s ears like the siege of Sarajevo…

I just needed to see something else, feel something different, and if I could meditate into this vortex of inevitability, perhaps then I’d be able to see beyond it, hoping time would turn in my favour, turn things around, turn me loose and anew from and to everything

turn turn turn,

there is a season,

turn turn turn,

and a Time to every purpose under the heaven

a Time to be born, and a Time to die; a Time to sow, and a Time to reap;

a Time to kill, and a Time to heal; a Time to rend, and a Time to mend;

a Time to weep, and a Time to laugh; a Time to mourn, and a Time to dance;

a Time to embrace, and a Time to forsake;

a Time to get, and a Time to lose; a Time to keep, and a Time to cast away;

a Time to be silent, and a Time to speak;

a Time to love, and a Time to hate; a Time of war, and a Time of peace

in short, a Time for everything and for nothing, for all and for none

Time, an indifferent valet, is here for everybody, yet waits for nobody

neither haste nor stalling will yield it, and no substance alters Time as it does the mind. with its one trick it plays on me in its constancy

same as it ever was, never holding up, never after us, same as it ever was

and in its omnipresence, in moments of triumph, of trouble, and tedium in between, Time promises everything under the sun and nothing more than the next ticking beat…

one of the prime elements, indivisible from the giving and taking amongst each other, as it sheds all of itself

for us to pass through, as if into and out of a membrane

and at the running down of the clock

and in the aftermath

we will remember naught

an uneasy alliance with Time we hold, one that reveals only as it unfolds

yet, Time cares not, it simply ebbs and flows, nothing more, nothing less

so it appears as though to mock, warp, soothe, thaw… or do all at once, nothing so much false as it is true

the passage of Time makes fools of us all, heroes and villains alike

then becomes the death of you.

Instead it was I who succumbed to that stare, and when I came to, the bliss burst, screaming