A wise man once told me that kept money isn't much fun. (I, somewhat unfortunately, can't remember if this was @leftsider, both wise men who have told me numerous wise things.) That little morsel of wisdom has been sitting in my head for a while now, slowly snowballing into some vast personal mantra I am sure I will unleash on people in terms of stunning polarization. Until then, though...

Last night the absurdity of some of my relationships dawned on me, yet again, in the typical sorrow inducing way it always does, "Why do I continue to become involved with people I know I don't want to be with for any extended period of time?" Isn't the point to go out and find the one, in the strictest How I Met Your Mother sense of the word? Isn't being with anyone else just wasting time until you find that one?

I keep focusing on the desire to expunge myself of expectations beyond the very basics that I need to keep going. I'm reminding myself that the past doesn't necessarily always predict the future, and a belief in that turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts because we subconsciously manipulate the world around us. So, for the most part, I am trying to forget that it all ends in sorrow, but not expect anything but good times tomorrow.

It's tough, because it always comes back to this one point: Even if I'm happy, aren't I just wasting my time if I really know that it won't last, based on personal reasons that have nothing to do with expectation or past calamity?

I asked myself this, and then thought about time in terms of a commodity, because that's what it is, that's how we treat it, time is, well, time is money, and kept money isn't much fun.

I started thinking about all my friends who don't do anything with their time. Either they're scared of the world, or scared of injury, or scared of hurt, or any number of things that they won't (or will) admit to themselves. People who spend all their time on their own, or saying no to experiences they've deemed too out of the ordinary for their realm of experience. People who spend their time talking shit on things they've never done. What do all these people have in common?

They've got huge fucking stores of time. Days upon days of time that they spend doing nothing with themselves all because they think it's better that way, safer that way, cleaner that way, happier that way. They don't realize the folly of it all: at least kept money stays in one place, it'll be there when you want it, but kept time disappears as soon as it happens.

Every minute you don't spend ends up being a minute lost. Kept time isn't any fun at all. Start thinking about your hours in terms of dollars. If you get paid $15 (or whatever) per hour at your job, start imagining that your life is a job, too, and you need to start living hours that are worth $15 each. Stop doing shit that isn't worth it, and start raping the value from your time. Unlike money, of which there can always be more of if you work for it, your time is finite and nonrenewable.

Go out there and spend some time, people. That's your lesson for the day.