The Time You Don't Have

For the summer time, I got invited into a small group where men in our neighborhood got together at 6:30am at a pavilion right beside our community pool. As I showed up, I was not sure what to expect; outside of maybe meeting some guys my age but what I noticed is that men from the ages of 28 to 65 showed up. Over the next 8 weeks, we circled around the question “How do you find joy in the middle of your work day?” In the mundane, ordinary, same old same old tasks, that sound amazing as a new hire but after the new hire energy wears off, that feeling of a new job or title disappears.

The question right there halted me, because it seemed all of the men had something in common. They all desired to find joy. As I began to think about it, in this life, we all are looking for joy, and one way to find that is to create it for someone else.

Principle To find joy on a daily basis often comes with the responsibility to create it for others. This will not come most of the time in the ways you expect. It will come most of the time through the “I don’t have times” or “I have somewhere to be.” Simply, the interruptions of life that seem like distractions, are the pathways to joy.

C.S. Lewis wrote it this way in a letter to a friend.

The interruptions are precisely one’s real life.

Reflection What if your job was really not the point? What if your infrequent interactions with people at your kids school was not to just drop your kids off? What if the random stranger stopping you at a gas station was not a hassle? What if we stopped looking at people who are "interrupting" us as obstacles and started imagining those people as our greatest opportunity for impact.

People are the point.

Staying an extra five minutes after a meeting to check in on your teammate, to ask someone how they are doing and actually stop and listen, not bypassing them on your way to the next meeting? Stopping to help your neighbor with a chore you see them struggling to accomplish alone in their front yard.

The same environment with the ability to see people and do something creates joy for others and turns your ordinary day into the most meaningful thing that might have happened to you in the past month.

Weekly Activation This week, you will get hit with what may seem as the largest inconvenience to your schedule for what you wanted to accomplish that day. Find that moment as the biggest opportunity to impact one in your entire week and engage. Give someone 5 minutes at minimum of time you did not account for in your week. The thing we all cannot make more of and have less and less every day we are alive.

Sticky Note The interruption is the way.