Yesterday marked the first weekend I ever had a Coffee with John. Typically, I meet up with people during the morning hours of the week.

The weekends are the days to do the cleaning of the house, getting things ready for the week, attending this or that event, or just tackling some sort of project I have created for myself – organize this, paint that, or just catch up with work, if needed. Always something, right?

This weekend, for the first in a while, I didn’t feel like doing any of the above. I felt tired and I was not in the best frame of mind – just stuck on my own story, you know?

Now, was I looking forward to a virtual coffee on a Sunday afternoon? Yes, and no. Yes, because the person is someone I love dearly and had not spoken to them in many years. And no, because I was just feeling lethargic and irritated at the world.

The hour came and I am glad I got out of my head.

But that’s not the only takeaway. What kept popping in my mind afterwards was how we gamble with time.

We think we have all this time to have that coffee with an old friend; take that one class we always been meaning to tackle; undertake and conquer that alluding home project; visit all the places in our list of countries to see and experience; call that one relative you have been meaning to call in the last three months…the list is endless, as long as the excuses not to tackle them. We gamble and think we will get to those things, eventually.

Perhaps, we will. Maybe we will live for 100 years. Still, even then, I bet you, we will still have not done all the little things we put aside for no good reason.

Not to say that we all now need to get into a race against time, running wild with no regards for the future or our responsibilities.

That would be fruitless. All I can say is that we gamble with time. The irony is that we think we don’t have the time to do all the little things we say we want to do. So we just put them aside, for another more auspicious opportunity that might never come.

I don’t know if this is true but I remember coming across somewhere about certain cultures that treat each interaction with each other as if the last one, with no guarantee of a future meeting. For me, there is something beautiful about that.

Makes me cherish people more, appreciate the day-to-day, and push myself to get out of my own head to just do one of those little things I have always wanted to do or have meant to do. We all make our gamble with time.

Make it worth it.