How to stop chasing Time - Taoism

I don't have time. Who hasn't said it? No time to read, to see friends, to rest, to exercise, to cook, to take care of myself, to do what matters. We say it without thinking, and those who hear us nod, they don't have time either. They're Russian too. They're overwhelmed too. This phrase has become the refrain of our age. We live in a society where not having time has become the norm, almost a badge of worth. As though being busy proved our importance, our usefulness, our place in the world. And yet the phrase deserves a closer look, a real look, one that questions what it actually says and what it quietly conceals, because it may contain less truth than it seems, and certainly less inevitability. Welcome to Life Wisdom. I am Chen Li, author of the blog Word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. Let's start with a simple, almost mathematical fact. We all have 24 hours in a day. Not one more, not one less. Time is the only thing distributed with perfect equality. Our grandparents had 24 hours a day. The people we admire, those who seem to accomplish a great deal while still making time for what matters, have 24 hours a day. Those who tell us they find time to read, to walk, to see their friends, even to be bored. They received no bonus hours. They have the same time as us. Time hasn't shrunk. The days of our childhood lasted 24 hours, just like today's even if they sometimes felt endless. What has changed is not time itself. It's our relationship to time, what we try to squeeze into it, how we experience and perceive it. When we say, "I don't have time," what we're really saying without quite putting it that way, is, "I haven't made this a priority," or, "I've filled my time with other things." The time we don't have is generally time we've given elsewhere, consciously or not, often without noticing. This kind of honesty about our relationship to time can be uncomfortable. It confronts us with our real choices, not the ones we claim to make, but it's also liberating, because it gives us back a measure of power over something that seemed to be slipping away. And yet our age has a particular trait. It manufactures urgency and conditions us to live inside it. Think about your phone. Every notification demands your immediate attention. Every message seems to expect to reply within minutes. Every email carries an implicit demand for responsiveness. So designed to create the sense of urgency, the red dot signaling something to see, the counter ticking up, the vibration that interrupts. This urgency is contagious. It spreads from person to person, from organization to organization. If everyone responds quickly, then responding slowly becomes suspect. If everyone is running, then walking looks like falling behind. We accelerate each other. Each of us adding to the pressure the others already feel in a spiral that benefits no one. But perceived urgency is not always real urgency. How many of your emails that feel urgent could actually wait a day, sometimes a week? How many decisions pressing down on you would benefit from more time to settle? How many conversations demanding an immediate reply don't actually need one? We've lost the ability to tell what truly needs our attention, from what merely makes noise. I once heard about a man who decided to stop replying to emails the same day he received them. He would wait 24 hours without exception. At first he was afraid of the consequences. People would think him slow, unreliable, out of the loop. But something strange happened. Some of the emails that had seemed urgent resolve themselves in the meantime. Others revealed their true nature, not urgent at all just loud. The ones that were genuinely important waited patiently for his reply, which arrived more thoughtful, more precise, more useful. By slowing down, he lost nothing. He gained clarity. Consider another paradox. The more tools we have that are supposed to save us time, the less time we feel we have, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the microwave, the computer, the smartphone, all these inventions promise to free up hours, to give us leisure, to relieve us of repetitive tasks, and yet we have never felt so short of time. What happened? The answer is simple. We filled the time we saved. The washing machine didn't create hours of leisure. It allowed us to wash more often, own more clothes, do something else during hours that used to be spent at the washboard. The computer didn't lighten our workload. It allowed us to do more work faster and therefore to receive more of it. The time gained was immediately reinvested, absorbed, filled. We fill time the way we fill space. If we have an empty cupboard, we find something to put in it. If we have a free hour, we find something to fill it with. This compulsion to fill runs deep. It may come from our fear of emptiness. Our discomfort with unstructured space. Our difficulty with simply being there. Doing nothing. The problem may not be that we lack time. The problem may be that we can't bear empty time. And so we fill it until it suffocates. If we want to understand our relationship to time, we have to look honestly at where it goes. This kind of honesty can be painful, but it's necessary. A woman I know tried this for a week. She tracked hour by hour what she was actually doing with her time. Not what she thought she was doing, but what she was really doing. The result stopped her in her tracks. She, who said she had no time to read, was spending more than two hours a day on her phone. Social media, news, endless conversations. She, who said she had no time to see her friends, was finding time for Siri she watched without really watching them. She was a habit out of inertia. She wasn't guilty. She was simply unaware of her own choices. Time was leaving without her having decided where it went. Absorbed by activity she hadn't really chosen. That didn't really nourish her. That filled her hours without filling her life. The schedules reveal our real priorities. The ones we live by, not the ones we proclaim. We say our health matters, but we have no time to walk. We say our friends matter, but we have no time to see them. We say our growth matters, but we have no time to read, to learn, to think. And you? If you looked honestly at your last week, where did your time go? Not where you thought it went, where it actually went. This isn't a reproach. It's an invitation. Because we can only change what we first allow ourselves to see. The gap between what we say and what we do isn't hypocrisy. It's usually a lack of awareness. We don't see where our time goes because we're not looking, because we're caught in the current, because the hours pass without our ever having truly inhabited them. Imagine a farmer from another era, or from today in parts of the world where older rhythms persist. This farmer probably wouldn't say he lacks time. He would say something else that everything has its season. The time for sewing is not the time for harvest. the time for work. is not the time for rest. The time for effort is not the time for waiting. The farmer knows there's no point pulling its seedlings to make them grow faster. No point harvesting before the fruit is ripe. No point stirring when the land needs to be left alone. This way of seeing things doesn't claim that life was better before. It simply says something we have forgotten. Time is not a resource to be optimized. It's a rhythm to be inhabited. Time is not an enemy to be fought. It's the element we live in, like the air we breathe. The farmer doesn't feel short of time because he doesn't try to fit more into it than it can hold. He does what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. He accepts that some things take the time they take and that trying to speed up what cannot be hurried produces only exhaustion and frustration. Tauwis wisdom echoes this farmer's intuition though it must be understood correctly. Tauwisdom does not call for inaction, for passive contemplation while life passes by and problems pile up. That caricature of the sage sitting on his mountain indifferent to the world is a misreading. What Tauwisdom offers is right action at the right moment. True effectiveness, the kind that doesn't waste energy in sterile agitation. The Tauwis sage is not someone who does nothing. He is someone who does what needs to be done without adding the excess that clutters and exhausts. Lautsou spoke of Wu Wei, often translated as non-action, but meaning something closer to acting without forcing. It's the difference between the swimmer who struggles against the current and tires himself out and the one who uses the current to move forward. Both are acting, both are swimming, but one waste his energy while the other preserves it. Apply to our relationship with time, this wisdom invites us to distinguish necessary action from useless agitation. How much of what occupies you each day is truly action? How much is feeling, reacting, motion for its own sake? How many of the urgency you respond to aren't really urgent? How many problems you're agitating over would resolve themselves? How many tasks you keep adding serve only to give you the feeling of being busy? Right action is economical. It goes to what matters. It does what needs to be done, then stops. It doesn't confuse being busy with being effective or being overwhelmed with being useful. If time isn't really what's missing, if the question is really about how we fill it, then something becomes possible, taking back control, choosing instead of enduring. Choosing your time doesn't mean having more hours. It means deciding consciously what fills them. It means learning to say no to what doesn't matter so you can say yes to what does. It means recognizing that every yes is a no to something else and the reverse is equally true. This kind of honesty is demanding. It asks us to face our own choices, our own avoidances, our own habits of least resistance. It asks us to acknowledge that if we don't have time for what matters, it's often because we've given that time to what matters less. Sometimes out of genuine obligation, but often out of inertia, habit or simple inattention. A friend told me how she transformed her relationship to time. She started by identifying three things that truly mattered to her, her health, her children, her creative work. Then she looked at her schedule and asked herself a simple question. Do these three priorities have a protected place in my days? The answer was no. Her health came after everything else. She only walked when time remained, which meant never. Her children had her physical presence, but rarely her full attention. Her creative work was postponed indefinitely, waiting for a quiet moment that never came. So she did something simple, but radical. She blocked time for these three priorities before filling in everything else. An hour's walk in the morning before the day began. A moment each evening with her children, no phone, no distractions, two hours a week to create, entered in her calendar like an unmovable appointment. The rest of her time didn't increase. It shrank, but something had shifted. She had stopped enduring her time and started choosing it. She had stopped saying, "I don't have time," and started saying, "Here is the time I have, and here is what I do with it." Choosing your time doesn't mean doing everything slowly. Some things call for speed, efficiency, concentrated effort. There are moments that require quick decisions and fast action. Universal slowness would be as absurd as universal speed. What matters is choosing where to slow down, protecting certain moments, certain activities, certain relationships from the surrounding frenzy, deciding deliberately that this deserves time, that this can move quickly. A meal with someone we love deserves our time. An important conversation deserves our time. A book we're reading to nourish ourselves deserves our time. A walk whose purpose isn't to arrive anywhere deserves our time. These moments ask us to really give them time, to truly inhabit them, to not already be somewhere else in our minds. Other things can move quickly, and that's fine. Administrative tasks, routine emails, functional errands. All of this can be done efficiently, swiftly, in order to free up time for what actually matters. The wisdom isn't to slow everything down. It's to know where to place the slowness and where to place the speed, to be present where it counts, and efficient where it doesn't, which is sadly often the opposite of our instinctive tendency. So instead of saying, "I don't have time," we could say, "I haven't taken the time. I haven't taken the time to read is trueer than I don't have time to read." The first sentence acknowledges that the time existed, but that we gave it to something else. It opens a possibility. If I haven't taken the time, I can decide to take it tomorrow. The second sentence closes that possibility. The time doesn't exist. There's nothing to be done. This reframing doesn't create extra hours, doesn't remove real constraints, doesn't solve situations where time genuinely runs short. And those situations exist too. There's no point pretending otherwise, but it changes something in our relationship to time. It lifts us out of powerlessness and gives us back our capacity to choose. It invites us to look clearly at where our time is going and where we want it to go. The time we have is the only time there is. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow isn't here yet. Only today is real. These 24 hours that open before us each morning are our only playing field, our only raw material, our only life in the act of living itself. The question is not how to have more time. No one has more than anyone else. The question is, what we're going to do with the time we have, how we're going to inhabit it, fill it, protect it, what choices we're going to make, consciously or by default, which priorities will show up in our actual schedules rather than our stated intentions. This kind of clarity isn't comfortable. It confronts us with our own contradictions, our own evasions, our own habits of ease, but it is also the beginning of freedom. Because as long as we believe we don't have time, we are going to have a lot of time. powerless. The moment we see that we haven't taken the time, we can decide to take it. Time is not found. It is made, protected, defended. It is taken consciously, deliberately, sometimes against the pressures that would strip it from us. And perhaps the wisdom is not to have more time, but to fully inhabit the time we have. This time that is here, right now, waiting for us to decide what we will do with it. you