Competing Against Time

"In the short time I have remaining, I offer you a draw."
              "In the short time I have remaining, I decline."

It's an exchange I would often hear tossed around at chess tournaments as a child. One player, usually in a clearly inferior but not immediately losing position would offer the olive branch, almost always to be turned down by the opponent who insisted on finding the win. Following this exchange, a peal of hushed laughter would ripple through the crowd of on-lookers as the players continued their anxious scramble against the clock. It's an interesting consideration: what do we choose to do with the limited time we are offered? As humans, our whole lives seem to be a race against the clock. While other species have learned to find peace with their biological timing mechanisms, humans are continually striving to fit more into 24 hours. To make matters even more complicated, while we are all assigned some definitive expiration date, there's no good way to determine when that expiration date will come -- like the carton of milk stuck at the back of the refrigerator, no one really knows their "best by" date. And in between the then and the now is an endless litany of daily deadlines and due dates, the end of one chapter of life and the start of the next. A common side-effect of this never-ending race is a constant sickly sweet feeling of nostalgia and a grinding fear that you should be making better use of your time. So, is there really any way to know for sure how well you are utilizing your time? It's a question that is always on my mind, more so lately. Anyone that knows me knows of my ironic penchant for tardiness in combination with a hyper-sensitivity to the concept of time. I obsess over last days -- the last performance of the school musical, the last day for seniors before graduation, and the last day of school. I'm the person that writes the page-long notes in the yearbook every year, the friend that spontaneously texts sentimental messages in the group chat... and, I'm getting better at changing my perspective, trying to focus on the firsts instead of the lasts. But it's difficult to not swing in the opposite direction, to stop my expectations from ruining my new experiences.


In chess, the players that are able to cinch the wins out of time pressure situations are the ones that are aware of the time left on their clock but are not intimidated by it -- the players that manage to focus on the position rather than fearing time. It's a lesson that I am still learning both in chess and in real life.