I arrived at a restaurant where my friend and I agreed to meet for an end of year dinner. We did not book our seats at the restaurant, yet knowing that the restaurant allows customer to spend only 90 minutes for a buffet menu and 120 minutes for another buffet menu. I arrived at around 15 minutes earlier than my friend and met the restaurant manager. He offered me a table for the 90 minutes’ buffet menu, but I said that I needed to wait for my friend. In less than 10 minutes, the manager came to me 4 times and asked if I was ready or not, with a convincing sentence on the last as he said, ‘time is ticking’.

This kind of restaurant relays on the time power, which few minutes does matter for them. Yet that sentence from the restaurant manager stuck on my head until now, reminding me that in this very limited time of life, we can do many things. However, we need to consider that just because we can do things, doesn’t mean we should do those things.

It is interesting to observe how people use their time, as meaningful as they believe. It is indeed will be varied from one to another as different people have different perspective in seeing time and seeing their meanings of life. Yet, the way they construct those perspective and meaning would be good to listen to.

I was just spent a week traveling to Morocco and met an old friend of mine in the desert trip. She quitted her job to live her dreams by working abroad and travelling all around the world for almost 2 years now. We talked about how each of us make use our time and found so many differences between us. As she currently has more flexibility than me, the way she organizes things are not in as tight as me. Yet, I met some people from some open trips in Morocco that I joined, who brought their laptops and worked while they were traveling. After talking to some people during my trip here, I realized that how people define their life goals and its values strongly influence the way they manage their time.

Some people said that they want to do good things for society and start for volunteering, some others want to achieve such a high career path and stay up late in the office, some others would believe on saving money and prefer to stay at home, while some others go everywhere but don’t really know what to do with their life. Such definitions would help people to prioritize activities and manage their time to achieve things, in every condition. Thus, those who want to excel in their job but also need to travel might still do their work on the roads. Those who want to do good things for society while traveling would stay in a location longer and be involved with local initiatives. Some people do more than 1 thing in their very limited time.

Those who travel know that life could give more than they deserve, as they meet various people and experience various things in the roads. While traveling, people can get inspired or even feel bad about their own life. These kind of feeling might redefine their life goals and values. As time is keep ticking, we might consider to look back our life goals and values and how we manage our time to make use of it so far. And before we judge how others manage their time, it’s always better to contemplate ourselves. We always can improve our life; we always can be better than who we are today.

Follow @yosea_kurnianto for more photos of my journey in Morocco!