I think it was Charlie Munger who talked, before he died, about putting time aside for thinking.
One of the things I'm definitely not good at is wasting time.
That is not to say that I don't waste a lot of time (I definitely do), but I'm not good at accepting wasted time without feeling guilty or concerned or anxious or worried that I've wasted time.
When I get a concerted period of time where I don't have anything scheduled to do, then there is an unease in my mind about what needs to come next or what I should do or how I should use the time.
I have explored this and leaned into it quite a lot of times before, not least in the ‘sabbaticals’ I had for several years where I would head off work for 7 weeks, completely unscheduled and sometimes out of contact with work and see what happened to myself and my mind.
Definitely in those times, it made me better. Maybe not better at my work, but just better.
The difficulty is that the way we live and the pressure that society puts on us, consciously or unconsciously, pushes us towards a lab rat situation where we're on the wheel and we think we need to continue running because if we stop running, well, something bad will happen.
It's an art, this wasting time; I think also it might have been in Winnie the Pooh, when they said: “wasting time with friends is never wasting time”.
The balance is the balance: go or don't go, but when you've decided not to go, embrace it, enjoy it, and don't feel guilty (entirely directed towards myself).
Great things happen when you let in silence; great things happen when you let in vacuums. Some of the greatest things in my life happened when it seemed as if there were nothing in front of me because things had been taken away, and then it turned out that there was.
Maybe it needs to get like that again.
Blog Post Number - 4678
Chicco is coming to Nottingham
This October, we’ll be welcoming Dr Chicco from Tanzania to The Campbell Clinic for his first visit to the UK.
To celebrate, we’ve launched Buy a Mile, asking our community to buy as many miles of his 4,745-mile journey as they can. Every £1 donated represents one mile, with every penny raised going directly to Bridge2Aid and its dental education work in Tanzania.
Buy a Mile and support Bridge2Aid here