Lost in Chronation

This is my stop watch. I live by it.

When I wake up, I strap it on to time my morning jogs.

When I do my daily studies I start my watch. When I need to eat, go downstairs to get the mail, etc... I stop my watch. And then I come back to study and start my watch again.

At the end of the day, I hope my watch reads something close to 3:59:00, signifying that I've studied around four hours that day.

I have yet to decide if I like quantifying my life so chronologically. But actually, this is not a new phenomenon.

It reminds me how in highschool, I used to time myself to see how quickly I could shower and brush my teeth. There was such a sense of urgency to get as much done in the day as possible. I needed to squeeze a minute so hard that 70 seconds came out. I was intent on carpe diem-ing to the point where I actually took only 4 minutes and 50 seconds to take a shower from fully clothed to fully clothed again.

It's been 7 years since I've been in highschool now and 7 years since I cared to carpe diem. I wonder what happened to that spirit of ambition and exuberance? Why am I now so content to channel surf for hours at a time? And take I-don't-even-know-how-long showers?

Perhaps the all elusive hope of attaining a meaningful goal is gone. When I was young and naive I thought that happiness could be obtained through diligence and lots of it. If I worked hard and plugged and chugged through school and piano lessons, somehow...happiness would be waiting there at the end of the finish line.

But somewhere along the road, in the midst of this metaphorical marathon, I must have clocked in at around 7years:2months:1day:8hours:56:minutes:and6seconds only to find that I was running on a treadmill all along. Or I looked around and realized that I was lost. Off the track that would take me to "victory". Where are the signposts that point me along the way?

And so time started to not matter. It's abusrd to see how fast I can get from nowhere to nowhere. But according to my stop watch...it takes me about four hours a day.