The Life of Lou Ruppert

I watched TV for a couple hours last night, and took a long lunch today. (Normally I eat it at my desk while reading blogs and wikipedia.) The nagging question I have is whether that counts as wasted time, since I’m behind on my projects as it is, and am always complaining about not having enough time to do everything, or is it needed recreation in order to be able to stay focused at all during the other portion of the day?

My inner bean-counter is screaming about the two hours of television. I might as well be an executive returning from a business trip with receipts for an all you can eat caviar bar and a whorehouse. My vocab tonight, by comparison, took just over an hour to enter. If I hadn’t made the extravagant “time purchase” of two hours of staring at the television last night, I could have been done with my Arabic vocab and could have spent tonight studying it or working on one of the eleven assignments. Or is that not true?

I was pretty exhausted last night, and pretty burnt out from two hours of class in the afternoon. It’s doubtful I would have gotten the vocab entered in only a bit over an hour, if I’d attempted it last night. Chances are, it would have taken two hours easily, and with a lot of mistakes. Meanwhile, I would have been soured on the whole study thing and probably wouldn’t have bothered to do any of it tonight, if I only had an hour to spend on it, and would have ended up worse off than I was by taking the time out to unwind. But did I really need two hours, or would one have sufficed, allowing me to get to bed early and rest my tired brain?

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Even God, master of the protestant work ethic, demands that we take one day out of seven to relax and unwind and spend time being thankful and unburdened. Jesus would frequently take time out of his speaking/miracles schedule to go unwind and check out nature, or pray, or catch up on some sleep. Laziness, or sloth, is a sin, but you could also argue that overwork is too. We’re only human. The time to smell the roses isn’t just when we’re weeding under them or rocketing past them on the riding mower. It’s good to stop from time to time and enjoy something with the same purity of focus that we spend on our work.

I may have squandered two hours last night, and probably an extra one for lunch today, but in the long view of things, I’ve probably more than broken even. Things are still in working order.