Everyone has a limited time on earth. There is no other way to look at it. Our time will eventually expire.

It is impossible to know when one’s time is up. As much as we fret about the future or the past, there is very little we can do about either.

Time can be like currency, in a way. For those of us who work for a living, we have a wage or salary which serves as our own personal exchange rate. We trade our time for money from our employer. Or, if we are self-employed, we use our time to produce goods or services we can trade for money at a rate we set. Even retirees on a fixed income trade time for money; as long as you haven’t expired in the prior month, the check comes again.

There are still only 24 hours in a day and plenty of non-work activities to do. We are constantly making little choices about how to spend our time. The only thing that is always true, we cannot create more time. We can only reallocate our attention in the moment.

What is your time worth to you? Now that the pandemic has changed how you spend your time, how do you feel? Do you feel more constrained, like you would choose to spend your time differently, or do you feel like some of the obligations and demands on your time have been lifted, allowing you more freedom than you had 2 months ago? Is it possible both can be true?

As with any period of change, there is opportunity to grow. Try to allocate some of your precious time to observing and documenting what you are missing from your life now that you can’t wait to get back and what you have been given the time to experience now that you may not have allocated to that intention before.

We will all come out of this changed human beings. It is what you do with this time that will determine whether you will change for the better.