filling the space

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life is simply "filling the space"...

A common mantra of our generation sounds something like this: "There's never enough time!" or "I need more time!" or "There are not enough hours in a day!". And yet the practice of our generation is to fill the space with the almightly electronic device: television or video games or iPods or computers or cell phones. Or perhaps "and" would fit better in that sentence than "or". We make excuses for it, say: "It's my way of connecting with people" or "I'm working" or "I can't help it; I'm addicted". [Whatever happened to real CONTACT, where we actually make the effort to see people face-to-face, talk on the phone, actually wrap our arms around someone rather than send an emoticon?] We fill the space around us with so much noise and activity that we really don't have any spare time. But what is spare time? And how much of the lack of it can we blame on work? society? addiction? habit? Really, we're the reason we have no time. We make our choices about how to fill the space. I know that if I'd just turn off the t.v., get off the couch, off this computer, away from the hum of electronics, I might actually have time for that book, a friend, creating clean space, writing with a pen on paper. We don't need more time. We need to reevaluate how we fill up the spaces in the time we have. Really, in the time we're given. We act like it's our time to spend, but we're actually living within the gift of time and we're expected to do something worthwhile and valuable with it, not just fill up the space.