64 - Solve for Happy - Chapter 6 - Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?

Ever pondered why some moments slip away like sand through your fingers while others seem to stretch into eternity? Join Denise Russo and Samantha Powell, as they connect the dots between our skewed perception of time and our quest for happiness, inspired by Mo Gawdat's insights from "Solve for Happy." Denise and Sam cover the six grand illusions that trip us up on our journey to joy, with a special focus on time's elusive nature. Prepare to be enlightened on how our engagement in beloved activities bends our sense of time—and how this knowledge could be the compass guiding us toward a more fulfilled existence.

As we navigate the continuum of past, present, and future, our conversation meanders through the abstract realm of dimensions, the relativity of time shaped by gravity, and the richness of life observed through the lens of atomic clocks. It's a trek across different perspectives as we share tales of personal experiences and cultural contrasts between event-based and clock-based societies. Discover how animals like cats, who bask eternally in the now, might be on to something we humans often miss in our frenzied lives.

Additional Resources:

Order: Solve for Happy

The How of Happiness website

The Passion Planner
Passion Planner discount code: RWRD.IO/EFWYE73?C

Denise Russo's Website
www.schoolofthoughts.net

Denise Russo's Forbes Articles
Forbes Article Link

Samantha Powell's Website and Blog
Lead The Game

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:29

Welcome to what's on your Bookshelf, with your hosts Denise Russo and Samantha Powell.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Hi everybody, welcome back. It's another episode of what's on your Bookshelf. This is our life and leadership podcast, where we're diving deep into the pages of the books that are on our shelves. In this case, we've taken a book off of our shelf. My name's Denise Russo. I'm here with my friend, sam Powell, and we are in an exploration of happiness through the book called Solve for Happy by Mo Gaudet. Each week we are going deep, diving into the chapters of these books, so that we're not only just reading the pages of the books, but where we're bringing them to life for ourselves. So we're up to chapter six now and, sam, I'm looking forward to this chapter with you. How are you doing today? I'm doing good.

Speaker 1: 2:20

You're excited about this chapter, right, like I'm excited because you're so excited about this chapter. So I'm looking forward to hearing your perspective on this one of the six illusions.

Speaker 2: 2:31

Well this chapter is. I don't want to. I can't say it's my favorite chapter because it's a hard chapter, but it's only hard because this is another one of the grand illusions. There are six grand illusions that Mo talks about in this book that prevent us from being fully happy and fully alive and full of joy. This is the grand illusion of time, and this chapter, for me, is so important because that we're going to talk about today how time, what time is, how it works.

Speaker 2: 3:03

This chapter is sort of sciencey, so some of it was a little bit hard for me to understand. Or maybe let me rephrase like comprehend, I suppose. Comprehend because time is elusive, like we look at the past and the present and the future as being what we believe time is. However, the illusions, they come from our past and our future. Because we're living in the present, we're going to be able to walk through, I think, if we have time today pun intended, I suppose through an exercise and how to take more control of your time. What I loved, as he gets started here, is the very first sentence of this chapter. Says there is no other illusion as immersive as time, because we constantly deal with it and take it for granted, so I'm looking forward to investing this time over the next 30 minutes, together with you, sam.

Speaker 1: 4:00

Yeah, and he says that our lack of understanding time is really what causes us to suffer, and I think that that's really interesting, right? He said, you know, the question we really should be asking ourselves is what is time itself and the you know and understanding really what the illusion that we've got of you know, of time really is?

Speaker 2: 4:24

Have you ever done something I know I've done it myself, we did it last week where the illusion of time is that it can go fast or it can go slow, right, like we got to the end of our episode last week and we thought, oh my gosh, we're out of time, and how did time go so fast? And we're over time, thoughts around time. And yet there's other people like I know oh my gosh, how many people we ever worked with that they think, oh man, I can't wait for Friday and I dread Monday. And they're looking at the clock, thinking, well, five o'clock, six o'clock, whatever time ever come. And yet there's other people that, when they're in love with what they're doing and they're great at it, and they're around an environment that's invigorating, and they're great at it, and they're around an environment that's invigorating and they're really living into their purpose, time seems to go by so quickly.

Speaker 1: 5:13

Yeah, and it made me think about the last book we read. And you know, one of the things that she said is one of the happiness boosting activities is to get into a state of flow, right, getting into those activities where you know where time passes by so quickly because you're just so involved in the present happy activity that you're doing. Right, you hear artists talk about this or writers. It's like, all of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, it's been six hours and I'm like finally coming up for air. But like it's a happy feeling, right, it's a good feeling.

Speaker 1: 5:52

And so, yeah, there's this illusion of time that you know that it's this, that it's a set thing. Right, we measure it very precisely, you know, we do all this stuff. It's like there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, and you know all that kind of stuff. So we measure it so much that we tend to think that it's this very set, very you know, very strict concept and you know really what it gets into. Is that's just not true, that's just an illusion.

Speaker 2: 6:26

He says that its passage feels different depending on the situation you're in. He said he gave an example, actually, where he flipped a car once that he was driving. He flipped from his car on top of a bridge like how scary, I can't even imagine this. And he says he hopes it never happens to anybody else. But what he observed was extremely interesting that it was almost as if time slowed down dramatically as his vehicle approached the point of impact, sort of like oh no, you know, I could see this the movie scene going uh-huh, yes, and so he then talked about how, at the same time, he had recalled a time where he had been in a lecture or something.

Speaker 2: 7:09

It was boring. It's like a two hour lecture. It goes by so slowly, and he just wanted to be with his friends. And so relativity is the way he described time. And so he started talking about Einstein's theory of general relativity. And that's where he starts diving into the science of time. Because you're right, sam, we can look at the sundials, we can look at the clocks on our walls or the watches on our wrists, and the same minutes tick.

Speaker 2: 7:36

But I recall seeing some interviews or articles in the past about things like how can the time of somebody like Steve Jobs, or which his time expired right Like he ended up dying, even though he was a master of time when he was alive? When you think about these people, whether they're a very successful business person or whether they're a successful athlete or whatever it might be, they have the same amount of time we do, but how is it that they can capture and maximize that time of their day even better than we can? And so he starts to talk about these things and how time and space are not two separate things, that they combine to create this four-dimensional structure which is called space and time. And this is where I started to get a little bit caught up in the science and it was confusing me a little bit. So I'm not sure what you thought about this part of the chapter sam. It was intriguing, but it got me a little bit, a little bit deeply confused yeah, I mean, understanding space time is pretty advanced science.

Speaker 1: 8:42

So I think most people are probably probably confused. But right, but right, but you know it's thinking about. You know, like the simplified way I think about it and I'm not a science educator, so forgive me if I mess this up, Right, but like you know, we think about. I think people understand dimensions, right, Like one dimension on a piece of paper or two dimension that goes up and down, and like we live in a three dimensional space. Right, I can move forward, backwards, upwards, downwards. Right, I can experience kind of this 360 view around me.

Speaker 1: 9:08

But like time is actually the fourth dimension, Like it's actually layered on, it's like that's probably where your mind's like what? Like it's sort of blown and that's okay that we don't understand it. Right, Like we learned in the last chapter last week. Right, Like you don't know it, Like we don't know all this stuff, it's fine and kind of accepting that is, I think, gives you some peace in it. But like the thing about time is that we can only experience, like this slice of it, Like, right, we just don't have the capacity really as humans to observe this fourth dimension in which we do live. Right, in which we do live.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Right, it's like time is passing as a physical thing as much as like we're moving through space or events are happening around us and time isn't set right. It's not moving according to the mechanical clocks that we create. Right, it actually like depending on gravity changes. If you're closer to a source of gravity, Right or farther away, things you know, speed up, slow down, you know that kind of stuff. We just can't observe that. You know as much. It's so small in the spaces that we have. Like, if you're on an airplane for a really long time, you know time is actually moving differently for you than somebody on the ground, but it's so small that, like, you really can't, you know, observe it. There's some great sci-fi movies out there that explore this concept.

Speaker 2: 10:31

Right Things like that Perfect example, even about the airplane, because I was on an airplane not long ago and we have our next book coming up. That's called the happiness project. Now I was captive on this plane for six hours, but I wanted to maximize my time. Some people slept the whole trip, some people watched movies they've probably already seen again on the trip. Some people were maybe thumbing through magazines or listening to music, but I wanted to use the time to read and so I had the same six hours that day. Then I had the day before I left on the trip.

Speaker 2: 11:07

The day before the day before the trip, sam, I have no idea what I did Laundry, pack my bags, maybe wasted some of my time, but in that six hours of consolidated time I reread the whole book that we're going to do next.

Speaker 2: 11:20

If you had said to me the day before hey, will you sit down for six hours and just read the book, I'd be like, no, I don't have six hours and no, I can't sit still for six hours.

Speaker 2: 11:31

But somehow I did, and what you described was was an interesting picture in this book that I'll that I'll try to do my best to describe and you'll have to help me with it. But you said that time is like your. Your version of time is a slice of the bigger picture, and so what he did was he has this picture in the book, if you can imagine, and this loaf of bread, if you can imagine that in your head, in your mind, this loaf of bread represents the past and the future. But where you put the knife into slice is where you are in the present, and so no matter where you are in, going toward the future, toward the end of the loaf, if you will, is where the knife moves into different slices, and it's. It is hard to comprehend, because time isn't moving. The loaf of bread isn't moving, the knife is moving, which is you're the one moving through time. Yeah, you're moving.

Speaker 1: 12:26

Yeah, and it's interesting to think about that right Of like, it's like being on a field, like I don't know. If you're on like a field and you are, you know, moving through it, the field's not moving. Like a field and you're, you know, moving through it, the field's not moving. Well, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, the earth is moving, everything's moving, so technically it is, but like, right, like relatively, the field's not moving, but you're the one running across it and it's, and basically time is the same thing. Time is just, it's a, it's a dimension, essentially, and you're moving through it, but you can only really experience like your present. But your present could be right, depending on where you are relative to some body of gravity, like could be different and and so you might experience time differently than you know, than someone else, which is just really interesting, right, and like. The whole point of this, because this is real science-y is that like time is not what you think it is right. Like time isn't some like mechanical, keeping track of my watch. We sync it all the time. We do whatever. Like, we have to do corrections on our like, you know, on the atomic clocks that we have, right, we do a leap year, we do leap seconds. We have to adjust to like keep up with these factors that don't fit mechanical time and so time itself is really just, you know, just an illusion. And he talks about, he kind of moves that into like a cat's view of time, right, like a cat doesn't care about the clock, doesn't pay attention to anything. It's like oh, I'm hungry now, so I eat. Oh, I'm inner, you know, I found something to play with, so I play. It's just this very like present way of living, of whatever the experience that I'm having is what it is, and like I just move through that time. And you know, in that, in that space.

Speaker 1: 14:10

And what I thought was super interesting is he kind of talked about this as he said that you know, you might be surprised to learn that events based cultures are more common globally than clock based cultures. And so what he means by events based cultures is like in South America or in the Middle East, right, like start times negotiable, end times negotiable. It's more about what's happening in that experience, right, like some people might show up to a party at eight. Some people might show up to a party at eight. Some people might show up to the party at 11. But, like, we're just experiencing that with the people as we are, like it doesn't matter what time they show up, it doesn't matter what time somebody leaves, we're just experiencing things like as the present.

Speaker 1: 14:48

If we were in a meeting and the meeting was going really well, no one would care about, like, wrapping that meeting up.

Speaker 1: 14:54

We're not going to arbitrarily end something because the clock says to do it right, this clock-based culture.

Speaker 1: 15:01

But we're going to wrap it up because we're in a state of flow, we're in the present moment, things are going really well and the event is continuing right. And so I thought that was super interesting because I've experienced, like right, I mean, I'm American, I grew up in this time-based culture we have in America, but I've experienced these event-based cultures and event-based you know, people that live in them and I. It's funny because people are like, oh my gosh, this person's never on time, they're sort of whatever. And it's like well, yeah, like why? Why do they need to be right? The rules are made up and the points don't matter it exactly, just you know it is what it is. It's more about that experience, it's more about that space, and I think it is interesting that he calls out, that there are actually more of those events space, and I think these are more like connection-based cultures than this. You know, industrial revolution, productivity space we find ourselves in, especially in, like the States.

Speaker 2: 15:59

Yes, absolutely. Well, he goes on in the book to say that the reason he goes into the depth of understanding time and the complexity of it and the sciency part of it, is because the more that you know about time, the more you'll appreciate that in reality, that it is nothing like we think it is. And my dad, when I was growing up, used to always say, and still does say, if you're late, you're definitely not on time, and if you're on time, you're late. Always be early. Like my dad was that business person that he wanted to respect other people's times and want people to respect his time. So he taught me at a very young age that you always show up early.

Speaker 2: 16:39

So I do my best. I don't always get to, because we also live in an age where you're going from Zoom to Zoom, to Teams to Teams, to meeting, to meeting, to meeting, to meeting, and sometimes the thing you're coming from goes over. So I always try my best to be early, which to me is not being early to be. To me, being early is being on time. And I'll tell you what I get so hard on myself when I am late or if somebody else gets there before me and it's not like. It's a race. Like you said, it's not to be there before someone else, and it suddenly lost something, except for me, I guess. I look at it as a loss of time.

Speaker 2: 17:18

And he says in the book though, while I surely don't advocate being late, slack or lazy, I would ask you to consider the merits of being the master of the task instead of being the slave to the clock. And so this makes me think about a client that I've been working with that I'm coaching. He's an executive that owns his own business it's a nonprofit, large, global organization and he was sharing with me that he's struggling with a couple people that he's working with that he keeps feeling like he's asking them for stuff that they're not delivering, and so I asked him the other day did you ask them for it by when, or did you ask it for them by the what or neither? Because if we are mastering the task instead of being the slave to the clock, he was perceiving it like he's been asking for this thing that people are not delivering on, but they may not know when he wants it by or how he wants it.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Right. Right, they don't know what his relative time is. Right, and if you don't communicate those things, if you don't talk about those things, if you don't understand the task at hand, then it does create chaos, right. Like we can't all show up whenever we want and leave whenever we want. Like that does create chaos, yes, but show up whenever we want and leave whenever we want. Like that that does create chaos, yes, but at the same time, we don't have to be a slave to the clock, right? Like we own time. Time doesn't own us type of a thing, right, it's our experience of time that really matters, not necessarily. Like time itself isn't a driving force. It's what we do with it, how we choose to react with it. And so it's one of those things. Like I'm the, I'm the opposite of you, you know. You're saying like, oh, it bothers you when you're early. I'm like, whatever, we're five minutes late. Like who cares? Like what's the impact? There's no impact, right, like someone else will walk in behind me, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Like a doctor's appointment they're always like be there 15 minutes early.

Speaker 2: 19:15

We must have different birthdays because I'm different. I'm the person that shows up to the airport when they say be here 90 minutes prior to departure. You know, I used to work for an airline and one of the taglines was in the conversation on the customer service side at the end of the phone call is basically don't forget to be there 90 minutes prior to your departure time. And so I Quinn hates this, but I show up two hours in advance. But I'm going to tell you a real story about why I think this is important Because, again, for me it's important.

Speaker 1: 19:48

There's no way I'm showing up that early. I'm the person who's like I get there. I get on the little tram, get to the airport and my gate is departing.

Speaker 2: 20:00

And it's like I have time to grab a water and a gum and I'm like all right, ready to go. Your birthday is definitely close to quinn, he's like you, so, uh, so we're getting ready to leave. Uh, south america. A couple months ago and my friend had just come from there and so he said, den, you need to leave your hotel five hours before the flight. And I was like what, five hours before the flight? The airport is only like 20 minutes away. He's like no, trust me, you need to leave five hours before.

Speaker 2: 20:27

Now, remember what you said in the book. It says different cultures are different with time. This is Latin American culture. Where I was, I was in South America. We left five hours before the flight. The the airport is 20 minutes away.

Speaker 2: 20:41

Oh well, 20 miles away for two of the first hours of us being in the car. We're on this two-lane road with five homemade lanes of traffic going in all different discombobulated ways. People are driving on the sidewalk, nobody is paying attention to red lights we got to one red light in the van that we were in and it must have gotten green like five times in a row and people are blaring on their horns and other people are hitting each other's cars just to get around. It was crazy, it was craziness, but in the end the five hours in advance if we had done what we would have thought in America would be normal 90 minutes prior to departure we would have missed the flight for sure. Because once we did get to the airport, then I guess for me what I like is we got to the airport, I didn't have to feel like I had to run down the hallway. We got to go to the gift shop. We got to kind of get our bearings straight and make sure we're OK. We got to go to the gift shop, we got to kind of get our bearings straight and make sure we're okay.

Speaker 2: 21:39

And then it turns out when you're in south america, or at least in the country we were in, not only do you go through the regular process of them checking your bags through, like whatever they call tsa right, but then when you get to the gate there's this whole long folding table brigade and they go through all of your carry-on bags again. So we had to empty all of our stuff out, all the souvenirs that we had time to buy now, and then we finally got on the plane and then funny enough is that on the plane I had a bottle of water that they gave us on the plane because you can't bring water in from the outside, so you wait till you get inside. Had my bottle of water on the plane and I thought, okay, I'm gonna save this because we have a connection in atlanta to be able to get all the way home, get to atlanta, and when you're doing an international connection you can't. You can't have any water for some reason. I'm like. But I just came off the plane where they gave me the water but they made me throw it away. So now I needed time to go get some more water once I got to atlanta. But that's just my funny little story about my trip from south america.

Speaker 2: 22:46

But the point of it is is that he says in the book because the book is about happiness, not just about my trip he says time, as we, it plays a big role in creating and perpetuating unhappiness. Like you were telling me about your style. That is the style of my spouse and so he is opposite of me and so for me, when he doesn't stick to time, it perpetuates my unhappiness, and he's not unhappy about any of it because he's, like you going with the flow and he's happy about it. But when I am early and I feel like I am stable, then I feel happy, but it's when that one little thing throws you off, which is what we talked about in maybe the last part, which is about you sometimes need a nudge to get out of that, because time doesn't really exist according to this chapter, and so he talks about, as he goes further along about when you scrutinize the thoughts that you have about time, then you'll notice that very few of them have anything to even to do with your present moment, your present moment. And so this makes me recall that same trip we were on.

Speaker 2: 23:55

I so badly wanted to go to this area where they have the ocean and there's these giant cliffs and you could watch the sunset. And we were. We were there before the sunset was coming down, and I remember thinking, oh gosh, ok, this is what time it is right now and this is what time Google says the sunset will be, but I wasn't watching my clock minute by minute. We were exploring and we were seeing things we had never seen before, and we were experiencing the culture and tasting the food and looking at the sites, and it was such a beautiful time and as soon as the sun did start going down, it was almost like this very ethereal, beautiful experience of watching this thing, and I started to think about how, sam, how many sunsets and sunrises have you and I in our lifetime missed that we'll never be able to see again? And it came to my realization of the elusiveness of time when I started to think about how.

Speaker 2: 24:51

Think about the average lifespan of somebody. Let's, let's say the average lifespan is 80, or let's be gracious and say 85 years old. That means you only have 85 birthdays in your life, and when you think of it that way, it's so few If you think about you only go to college for four years. It's so little If you only have this one hour together. Or you know, we only get to talk to each other a couple hours a week, and there are way more than a couple hours that are in a week. What are we doing to appreciate and value in the present moment? And so in that sunset I didn't. So in that sunset I didn't have my camera, I didn't have my phone, it was just me, just watching this beautiful thing that will never, ever, ever happen the exact same way again, and it was like this instantaneous realization that we don't we take too much advantage of the time that we have.

Speaker 1: 25:53

Right, right, because we end up such a slave to the. It's ticking. You know, we got to do things by a certain time, it's all that sort of stuff. But that's what he's really encouraging us in this chapter is to bring yourself into the present, is to bring yourself into experiencing what's happening right now.

Speaker 1: 26:12

Right, we're so unhappy because we're thinking about, we're worrying about the future, we have anxiety about the future, we have fear about the future or we're, you know, we have regrets about the past. We're thinking about the things, right, like, everybody has those moments that, like when you're trying to fall asleep at night, you're like, oh, in seventh grade, remember that time I did that thing. And you're like, oh, in seventh grade, remember that time I did that thing. And you're like, ah, right and it's, we all have that. But like that's what's driving our unhappiness. And so, if you can ground yourself back in the present, if you can bring yourself back to like the experience, right, like not sitting there in your hours worth of traffic on the way to the airport going oh my gosh, this is going to be terrible, this is whatever it is like. Oh, that's like sitting in all that stress of worrying about what's to come, but just enjoying the fact that, like you're on a crazy road, experiencing crazy things, seeing things you're never going to see again, right, like that's, that's an amazing experience. And so like pulling yourself, like stepping outside of time and understanding that like really all you ever have, the only thing you can ever experience is the present. You can't experience the past. You can think about it, right, but like you're in your thoughts at that point and you can't experience the future, you can only think about it and you're in your thoughts at that point. You're either in the present or you're in your thoughts, and that's really what he's getting at here.

Speaker 1: 27:24

And that you know, if you want to bust this illusion, that one time is way more complex than we understand it to be. It is not the ticking time clock that's on your wrist or on your computer or on your phone. It's way way more complex than that. Then you can move into this space of well, then, the only thing I really do have is right here, right now. And that doesn't mean you ignore the future. It doesn't mean you don't leave five hours early because you have to leave five hours early, right. It doesn't mean you don't leave five hours early because you have to leave five hours early. Right, it's having the awareness of what you need to do, but not letting it drive you to this level of unhappiness, Letting you experience that as you go.

Speaker 2: 28:03

He talks about how it's about connecting to your present and connecting to your present without that much brain power, and so I promised we would give a quick exercise before we're out of time. So you can try this at home, friends, after the podcast. But the exercise is really similar to the one that you said, sam, that I often do with different clients.

Speaker 1: 28:23

I thought about it yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:25

I like this one, so I'm going to describe it so that you can do this at home on your own. What you basically do is you sit somewhere comfortable it's called the full awareness test and you sit somewhere really comfortable, you take a couple of deep breaths, like you would if you were going into mindfulness or something like that, and you just relax and you close your eyes. There's nothing else you do yet. So you close your eyes, you're in a relaxed state, you keep them closed for about a minute or so. It doesn't have to be exact, even though for me I'd probably set the timer for you. Maybe you wouldn't set the timer, but just for about a minute or so. It doesn't have to be exact, even though for me I'd probably set the timer For you. Maybe you wouldn't set the timer, but just for about a minute. And then you're just clearing your what he calls your visual palette, which I thought was so nice of a way to describe it, but you're just kind of clearing out your mind. Then you literally only open your eyes for a couple of seconds and you look around really quickly to where your surroundings are, and you don't do anything more than just observe what's in your immediate environment and then you close your eyes again. So you only have a couple seconds to do this part.

Speaker 2: 29:21

You close your eyes again and now, with your eyes still closed, you silently describe to your brain everything you just saw, because you only opened your eyes for those couple of seconds. You go into as much detail as you can, as much factual information as you can, but you try to not let these thoughts intrude your brain while you're doing it. So it would be a factual statement like I opened my eyes and I saw the webcam on my camera, not like oh and um. The webcam was slightly tilted and it's kind of making me feel upset that it's not straight. You're just saying I saw a camera. You might say something like I see a tree outside my window, but you don't then say and it looks like I probably have to rake the leaves because they're all falling off the tree. Just talk about the facts, and then what you do is you notice what you observed in just those couple of seconds. How many other things in life do we not take notice of because we don't take the time to notice them?

Speaker 1: 30:21

and that's just in a couple seconds yeah, and I thought it was really interesting, right, because he's saying that like you're observing for just a couple seconds, but then you're, the description will take you minutes to really do that, and it was. And it's kind of this amazing thing that, like we're able to observe and take in so much information, kind of subconsciously. Right, you didn't think about every single one of those things, you just glanced I mean it's a glance around the room, but then I can describe to you in robust detail all of the stuff that is, you know it's going on, which I thought was super interesting because, it's true, like I tried the exercise.

Speaker 2: 31:01

Yeah, it's really interesting. I really encourage you to try it. And you know, friends, the reality is this this book is about happiness, not just about things and thoughts. So to bring it back around into happiness, as we end up with the end of this episode, he says every stressful or unhappy thought exists outside of the here and now, while every observation of the here and now eases you into a peaceful place. This is why I use these exercises in my coaching sessions. And he says if you want to be happy, you need to find a way to live in the here and the now and enjoy the moments of the here and the now, and that nothing's going to change. What happened last year, that was last year and you can't predict what will happen next year, let alone in the next five minutes to just be present and live in the here and the now. And I have so much more I could say about the wonderfulness of this chapter, about how to live in your present moments and how my friend Wendy does this so beautifully well, despite her circumstances, and that when you are present in life, being right now, it can be really amazing. So I'll close with my thoughts and then I'd love to hear your thoughts, sam is that when I first started researching the concept of Ikigai which is funny because last week we talked about knowledge and knowledge comes from words and things like that.

Speaker 2: 32:20

That's a Japanese word that doesn't really have an English translation, but some people think that it's something you have to chase after, which is chasing after your purpose in life. But the Japanese culture says that no, it's within you already and you just have to recognize and appreciate the moments that are within you right now. Your purpose is already within you. You just have to maybe uncover it or dust it off a little bit, and that, when you spend each day to the fullest and you don't rush your life away, and that you cherish the moment you're in and you tell people you love them and you do things you enjoy and you worry less and you spend time with the people that you care about the very most, then this chapter comes to life, about how you maximize your time. So that's for me, what I took away from it. How about for you?

Speaker 1: 33:06

Yeah, I think the thing that struck me in this chapter was, you know he had talked about somebody who was suffering because they had, you know he had talked about somebody who was suffering because they had, you know, a diagnosis for an illness that you know they probably only an 18 month outlook. You know in what they had to live and they were like, oh, this is terrible, like there's no way I could be happy, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's like there are a lot of people who won't be here in 18 months, but they don't know it and they're happy because they're not thinking about it, right?

Speaker 1: 33:31

And it's that like. To me, that was the thought process, because you hear that a lot of like you know you're not guaranteed tomorrow, and that's absolutely true for anyone, right, you're just not guaranteed the future. And thinking about all of that and thinking about that, that just robs you of the joy you can have now. And so getting into these spaces where, hey, it's like let me appreciate what's around me, let me connect with the people I want to connect with, let me do something today. And it reminded me of a tool I had a therapist give me one time. That was like you know what's your like, what's your quadrant. It was like your four key things and you had things that you did.

Speaker 1: 34:09

Right, like you know what are my roles that I want to have in life, or what are my, you know my four most important things, right, like I'm a spouse, I'm a mother, I'm, you know, I'm a. I want to contribute to society, I want to, you know, do whatever it's like, whatever your, your important things are. But you, the key to have, like one of the keys to happiness, was to hit something every day. Right, if your spouse is important to you, then connect with them every day. That's all you've got right. If your children are important to you, spend that time connecting with them. If your friends are important to you, if you know, if your job is important to you, then you know, spend the time connecting and appreciating what that is in this moment. And I think that, like you know, because the rest is just an illusion of time, right Like it's an illusion that I have tomorrow. It's an illusion that you know all the things that happened are you know. You know we're there. It's I just have now, yeah, spot on.

Speaker 2: 35:02

And that's actually a really great segue for what we'll talk about next week, friends, which is this, the fifth of the sixth grand illusions. It's the grand illusion of control which we all think we have, and it's not about being out of control, it's just being in acknowledgement of the things that are outside of our control. So I'm really looking forward to that next week with you, sam. This has been just another wonderful time together with you today. I'm so happy that we were able to invest these moments to be able to not only just share with our listeners, but to share with one another and to grow together as we move through that big loaf of bread together in our slices.

Speaker 2: 35:42

And friends, if you've enjoyed this, we ask you to please subscribe, share, comment, get in contact with us. Scott has ways in the show notes for you to reach out to us and share what things are resonating with you. We love hearing from our listeners. Thanks for being with us. My name is Denise Russo, on behalf of my friend, sam Powell. This has been another episode of what's On your Bookshelf.