Every morning I’m in the gym, I call out:”Hey Siri, one minute!” – and every five minutes I run, I say “Five minutes!”.

It’s been like this for a while, as part of some process of systematization that’s started happening in my head sooner than I could say any lickety-splits or even consciously question why it should be like that.

If it seems a little robotic, rest assured that I think the same – but that if I try to look back onto how I became this way and why, the explanation seems simple:

It seems to be a result of my matured understanding of what freedom consists of.

Perhaps that seems a little paradoxical, but it becomes a little easier when you quantify the result in this case: An hour and a half of exercise in total, continued weight loss, muscle retention, as compared to three hours doing the exact same thing and then getting fatter.

In other words? Less expenditure for a better result.

I suppose if I look a little deeper within and across this externalized record, it becomes more clear how this came about.

In late June, I wrote The Value of Time, in which I talked about how I feel every second now, how it all passes and comes by – how I refuse to waste the seconds as they flow into minutes; if I were to expand on that, I guess I could say that time is after all how we experience life in its shades – at the end of the 3600 seconds that make up the next hour from this word on, an hour of my life and your life will be gone – and how we experienced that hour is an experience we earned with our time and that we will never get back.

A. Do I want to experience that hour either trying to accomplish the goal that I set for myself to accomplish in far excess of what is actually needed in order to accomplish it?

B. Do I want to experience it in that state of loss where I am yet to reach it and therefore yearn for it, putting myself back into the cycle of A), or do I prefer to spend it in the confidence that I was able to accomplish my goals?

I suppose B) is a lot better – but that’s also why I started using the timers – the extended feeling of efficiency, the feeling of unloading of a cognitive burden – the realization that suffering would happen and time would pass regardless of what we did and that therefore, planning out a reality where as little time was spent so that we could have better choices and options with our time might make a little more sense than slogging away and trying to reach something that we never were working for in the right way.

In a weird way, the timers produce abundance – the discipline produces freedom.

This is one of the many strange and small contradictions that the world permits, I suppose.

There are probably many more of them that I’ve yet to know, experience, have thought about, or processed.

I wonder what they consist of, and what experiences will trigger me to think about them and then level up.

Whatever they are, I look forward to meeting future me. 🙂