“I believe that you can’t make time. Time can’t be made. It can only be taken. It can be taken by us or it can be taken for us. And that’s a choice that we have to make.”
-Ryder Carroll, Focused: Episode 107: The Bullet Journal Method, with Ryder Carroll
Time Stamp -08:43
I’ve found myself thinking about this quote from a recent episode of the podcast Focused over the last few days. The whole episode was incredibly insightful, but this was a line from the show that really resonated with me. I was sitting at a stoplight when I heard it and immediately fired up the app Drafts on my Apple Watch so I could transcribe at least a part of it. Later, when I had the time, I found the spot in the episode and jotted down the full quote.
I think I have this line on my mind so much because there’s context here that’s open to interpretation. Let’s try and break it down real quick.
“I believe that you can’t make time. Time can’t be made. It can only be taken.”
This is 100% factual. There’s no way to create time. Time is always moving forward, never backwards. We can’t skip time, we can’t rewind or relive it. We can only keep traveling to the distant future…the slow way.
“It can be taken by us or it can be taken for us. And that’s a choice that we have to make.”
This is the part of the quote I find myself obsessing over, almost trying to dissect. “It can be taken by us or it can be taken for us.” The way I see it, “Taken for us” can have two different meanings. One meaning is that we can take that time that we choose to take and take it for ourselves — to go for a walk and clear our minds, to write in our journal, to just listen to the sounds of the world around us.
More likely, though, in this quote, Carroll is referring to the fact that if we don’t choose to take our time, someone else will choose to take our time for us. That can come in many forms: at a job we can’t stand, in a relationship we don’t like, essentially doing anything that isn’t making us happy. We chose not to take that time for ourselves so now someone is taking it for us.
Admittedly, I was tired when I listened to this podcast — writing this has made me want to go back and listen to that segment again. By the time this post goes out, I definitely will have. What do you think Ryder Carroll meant by this quote, though? I’d love to hear your take on it down in the comments below.
Dan Stransky 