34 Minutes

I set a reminder at 12:00 PM to do something that I need to get done, I left the house at 12:34 PM to do it.

34 minutes late.

To a lot, 34 minutes late is ok if no one is waiting for you. And for a while now it’s been ok for me too.
But I think I’ve hit a wall in life, progress is harder and harder to achieve, and I need something to kick it to the next gear.

I remember a time in my life, when I was much younger, when time was extremely important to me. I remember that I had it down to the t how long it would take me to go to school, exactly when I’d leave, exactly when I’d get there. How long to the bus stop. To the library, to my friends house, to the grocery store. Everything was mapped down in detail in my 12 year old head. Sometimes I’d even go as far as break down exactly what movements I’d make when I went to get a snack from the kitchen.

Why? No reason, usually just because I could do it. But when it involved other people, there was fear involved too. Fear of disappointing them or hurting them in some way because of my lateness. None of my friends were like that though, I’d wait around for them when they were supposed to be ready at a certain point, I wouldn’t say anything. And I’ve experienced plenty of times when I’d get to a party or someone’s house and be the awkward first person there because someone told me it’d start at 8:00.. when they actually meant 8:34.

So over time I loosened up a little. At first it was difficult, I had to time it to be later than usual. Knowing that I had to be “fashionably late,” I’d time to head out at 8:22, the drive time will be about 11 minutes, parking and etc probably 2 minutes. That’ll get me there at approximately 8:35. Hopefully I’ll be the third or fourth person there.
After a while this became normal and I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

But now, I’m in a different phase of my life. Right now I don’t need or care about being awkwardly early to parties. I don’t go to any parties. Right now my meetings with people usually involve business of some sort, even the ones with my friends because we’re all at similar stages of our life. Now, every minute late is a minute of negative energy, sucking life out of my day, life and energy I need tremendously to climb the mountains that I want to be climbing right now.

But that’s with other people, why am I being so hard on myself for a personal goal that didn’t have any real consequences? I didn’t have anything else going on in my day, I didn’t have to be on time.
But it was a commitment I made to myself. It’s my life that I’m living right now. My life that I’m building. Try building a house where every joint is ±0.34 degrees off the angle.

How you approach the smallest things in your life, is how you approach everything in your life. I can see all the ways that lots of things in my life are 34% off the mark. I can tell myself that 34% isn’t that bad, it’s better than 40% or 50%, I’ve met people who are that far off the bullseye of their life.
But will I, a brown-asian man with glasses, be satisfied with a 66%, a D, in life?

Hell no.

Thank you for 2m 19.5s of your life.