It's really funny to me that the first decision that most people consciously make each and every day is to sleep more.
Our alarms go off, and then the first thing we actually make a choice to do is to hit the snooze button and start our days out with just a 'few more minutes' of sleep. Sleep rules at 6 a.m., and everything else seems to fall into place behind it.
We choose sleep over a morning workout, sleep over a healthy breakfast and sleep over spending some time reading or doing whatever else chills us out and prepares us for the day at hand. The point is, our sense of priority and time are misconstrued and blinded by something so simple as sleep. We don't think normally, and, in reality after we've overcome the snoozing 6 a.m. thinking process, we kick ourselves after we realize that 20 minutes of extra sleep wasn't really worth the sacrifice of getting a solid, 30 minute workout done before the day began. When we're blinded by time and not thinking logically, we lose our sense of priority, and we become inward focused. We fall victim to time selfishness.
Hitting the snooze button is an easy example of how we can personally lose our sense of priority based on how we're spending our time, but what about the harder examples that face someone day in and day out during every day life? What about when a stranger's car is broken down on the side of the road, and it looks like they could use a hand? What about when a man stops you on the street and asks for some help buying some food? It's in these situations that our sense of priority can become warped by our sense of time.
The other day, as I was walking into work downtown in Tulsa, a man on the street kept yelling at me for something (I don't know what because I didn't stick around long enough to ask). He must've followed me 10-20 yards, all the way until I got inside the building, just yelling, "Sir! Sir!" I don't know if he needed money, directions or just had a question about the building, but what I do know was that I was running late to work, and I had a meeting to be at in five minutes. Looking back now, even to just acknowledge the man would've taken me maybe 30 seconds, but in the moment when I felt rushed, my sense of time clouded my sense of priority, and I sacrificed a person's real needs for my personal clock.
When I'm thinking in a normal state, I'd like to believe that I highly value a person's needs over my own; however, when my priorities get mixed up because of time selfishness, I sacrifice what's really important in life- mainly other's needs. In the moment, it's easy to hit the snooze button and skip out on making a good breakfast, just as it's easy to ignore a guy who may just be asking for directions; however, maybe if we hadn't hit the snooze button in the first place, we'd have both time for a good breakfast and time to acknowledge someone else's needs.
-Cliff
Cliff's Note: The snooze button is the root of all evil.