During the summer, I blocked out from 2-5 pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for “Spying on the Divine,” which was my time to explore the magic of Baja nature—no agenda, just me and my dog Jamie.

More recently, I’ve allocated those same days for two hours of Spanish classes with my friend Ivonne in nearby Todos Santos (here’s a past post about how to learn a language later in life). I have thirteen sessions a month with her. I’ve told her a couple of times a month I may need to cancel within 24 hours of my scheduled session. Of course, I pay her for that. On a particularly crazy day, I love getting two hours back in my calendar and knowing I just “bought two hours.” I pay Ivonne $15 for our one-hour session, so my extra time only costs me $7.50 per hour, which, when I feel very time-crunched, feels like a small, indulgent luxury. And Ivonne doesn’t seem to mind it at all.

Finally, one of our MEA alums Dave Levenson recently helped me to see that a lifetime is extended when you’re living in “lovetime.” What the heck is “lovetime?” It’s when you feel in love with what you’re doing and who you’re with so much that you lose track of time. For those of us who unconsciously believe the gods dispense a certain finite number of life hours to us, it’s almost like these hours associated with being “in the flow” don’t count against our limit. So, let’s welcome more lovetime in our lifetime.

William Penn said, “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” Isn’t it odd that when someone goes to prison, we say they’re “doing time.” Often, we create our own mental prisons doing time based upon a full calendar. Maybe it’s time we bought a little time. It might be the best investment of our lives.