URSABLOG: Time Please

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

Time is short, so shouldn’t I be making more of it? As I get older I am beginning to understand that I need to utilise time better at the same time – paradoxically perhaps – as I also begin to understand that it is fast running out.

A friend in shipping recently shared with me a comment from his old boss: “Money will eventually not be a problem for you in shipping. Time will: you will never have enough.” That matches my personal experience, but time for what? In shipping, time counting is not a philosophical concept: time is most definitely money.

The demand for shipping is derived from the fundamental demand for trade, and trade – in goods at least – is, as I am fond of saying, buying and selling over time and space. The goods need to travel for the sale to take place, and that travel takes time; how quick or slow it takes depends on many things, but the duration of the voyage depends not only on the speed and size of the ship, but also on the restrictions – geographical, geopolitical or otherwise – that the ship encounters en route. Likewise the supply and demand fundamentals of a particular size and type of ship depend as much on when ships next become available for employment as to the numbers of ships actually in existence. Once on demurrage, always on demurrage.

The lack of time, or more accurately the lack of free time (assuming every other type of time comes at a cost) is the complaint of our age. Work-life balance – as if they were two completely different things – is constantly looked for. Somebody told me recently “I work to live, not live to work,” as though work itself was simply a means to an end, and carried no joy or fulfilment in itself. And it’s not as if the end is always joyful or fulfilling either, at least from where I’m watching. In many cases the quest itself seems to be doomed to frustration and unhappiness.

If time is commoditised in shipping, time in shipbroking is even more precious. I gave up the battle of carving out “me” time from shipbroking long ago: it’s impossible. We simply cannot do things just when they suit us, in office hours, or in ‘power hours’: we act on the instructions of our clients, and if the time is now then now it is, whatever else we are up to, because if we don’t have the time to do what is required, our competitors certainly will. I found trying to separate work and life tended to cause more stress than the work itself.

But this approach has never led to a happy medium. Business takes priority, and much was lost even as the rewards rolled in. Sometimes I wonder, deeply, regretfully, what is life for? Is it to be happy? To live a happy life? Or work in order to eventually achieve happiness as a life goal?

I am suspicious of the quest for happiness. I strongly believe happiness is transitory, and during the times when we are truly happy it is because then we are simply, and fully, alive, living in the time and place we find ourselves in. Happiness therefore can usually only be appreciated in retrospect: “We were happy then, they were good times.”

But these thoughts can be very misleading: it’s as if our brain deletes the memories of other bad or boring stuff that was going on at the time to leave behind the afterglow of happiness. That is probably why I associate certain places with a feeling of happiness, even when the details are murky and misremembered. It is also perhaps why I want to go back to certain places as if the very buildings, stones, beaches and mountains can give me what I’m not feeling now.

I prefer the concept of a good life. A good life, however, is not necessarily a happy life, and time cannot be simply utilised or optimised just for the good. Time, rather, is a medium in which character, integrity and truth reveal themselves, or not. All in good time.

If I want to live a good life then the goodness of that life will only become apparent at the end of it – or more usually, after it is over – and, rather frustratingly, I won’t be around to appreciate it, or even acknowledge it. So is it worth doing the best I can, trying to be the person I think I should be, and therefore living a life worth living?

Time, being the medium that brings forth the consequences of our actions, reveals who we really are, for good or ill.

Even more starkly, time can reveal who we now are depending on how we spent our time in the past. Did we spend our time working on ourselves – physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically – or just make excuses for gratifying our appetites, going with the flow, or only living once? Did we mistake pleasure for good? Did we confuse status for worth? Did we mistake performance for action?

Time teaches us – sometimes all too late – what we have become by the actions we have taken. It can be a tough lesson, especially when you realise there is no opportunity to resit the exam. And once we have absorbed this lesson, how do we use the time left to us?

Can a shipbroker, especially this shipbroker, live a good life? Should he or she even aspire to one?

Enough of these rhetorical questions. There is no magic key, no silver bullet that brings a satisfactory resolution to all parties concerned.

I was not in control of the time and place where I started in life, and that starting point had distinctly different advantages and disadvantages from the starting point of others, even to my own brothers and sisters. I was unable to understand myself, and what I really could or couldn’t do – physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically – until I put myself into the necessary trauma of growing up and becoming a distinct individual. That is still a work in progress. But it was – from a frighteningly early age I now see – already evident to me that the choices I made – however lightly – had permanent consequences that I could not undo at will. I may have had second chances, but it was up to me – wherever I attempted to put the blame, or find appropriate excuses – how I wished to choose to live my life.

A good friend of mine once told me that the only time when you know the deal you have done will stick is when both sellers and buyers are unhappy with the deal they have done. They have had to compromise so much, come out of their comfort zones, crossed and recrossed so many red lines that the agreement reached is far more solid than one agreed in happy and mutual consensus. Apart from so much time, effort and pain being spent – that will be hard to ever retrieve – they have been tested to their limits. They may be bitterly unhappy, upset, frustrated, but they are still, by definition, willing buyers and willing sellers.

Life cannot be solved, it has to be lived. Wisdom cannot be acquired just by sitting around and reading books; it has to be earned – sometimes painfully – by the very act of being in the world and engaging with it. Truth – that most specious and flexible of words – has to be faced, rather than gained; it was there all along as long as we were willing to see it, to understand it. So what can I do with the time left to me? Live it. However challenging and draining this may sometimes be, the alternatives are too horrifying – and too cowardly – to even consider.

Simon Ward