Making Moonshine

Distillation. What happens when you don't have time or energy? Two options. You're tired and you let your "down time" be down time. Tune out, turn off. Second option: you hoard that precious time to do something that you care about enough to ignore the exhaustion. 

It's easy to tell someone that they have the time and they're just not using it. But let's give them some credit: how much can they accomplish in those scattered hours?

Not too much credit: how much can they accomplish if they don't use their scattered hours?

We do not primarily build our dreams in the midst of a spontaneous break from or leveling of our lives as they currently stand. We build them slowly, one cog at a time, in the moments that we can separate from our lives of being committed to other people's projects (which is not all bad--you love your family, your friends, and so you are happy to help them along their way).

But to return to my first word, this reduction, this paring down of our time, forces us to grapple with the question of what is most essential. To get from point A to point B, what must I do? And before that, what do I care about most?

See also: the enormous number of things that I was able to pursue over the past few months because I had few commitments and no money. See now: 55 hours a week spent between full-time job and contract work. 

If we want to distill our interests down to the things that we ultimately care about most, we can do few things more effective than to reduce the time that we have to do them in. Hopefully the result will be a clarity of mind, a sense of focus, and a concentration of purposive action.