Do you have thirty minutes? Most of us are caught in a whirlwind of job, social life and personal recreation habits which only loop us back into the möbius strip of the selfsame lifestyle quirks, lending our lives the generic shade of a hamster on a wheel. We feel obliged to live our lives a certain way. But do we really have thirty minutes for ourselves? For a conversation with a stranger, for practicing playing a musical instrument, for petting a dog? How do we know the things we do from morning till night are good for us, healthy for us, and are generally taking our lives towards a providential future?

You could be nihilistic here, and say that none of these considerations matter and a life can be lived in any which way the person deems it to be; say that anything goes. I am not talking to you at all. I am talking to the person who believes in getting better today from yesterday and tomorrow from today; someone who is taking positive baby steps in their own self development. I am not talking self-help either. None of the self-help books I read offered me anything useful in practice; or it may be so that I am unaware of it even if they did. And this is not about making you think that you can suddenly jump up to an IQ level that challenges stalwarts like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. My question is, again, do you have thirty minutes today?

When I look around I see a lot of people who are either busy with their phones or busy with their work. There seems to be nothing else in between, except for a caffeine-deprived sleep. And people who have reached their thirties, quite importantly, seem to take their lives too seriously to start learning a new skill. As we grow older, our impatiences towards what we can and cannot do get disillusioned in our heads. So, it doesn’t even occur to us to try practicing a new skill. Time is another factor. Most young people prefer working sixty to seventy hours a week. They choose such punishment to find job and financial security—calling back to the hamster routine. I am not sure how the work-life imbalance does not strike them as a serious problem.

In my experience, there is nothing more satisfying than learning a new skill, even when it is frustrating in the beginning to achieve simple goals. It could be anything new, anything artistic. Join a crash course in flying, or learn a new language. It need not be a lot of things; two is enough; if not one is extremely appreciable. Especially, in this time of the Pandemic, it is important to keep yourself occupied with something that offers an outlet for all the stress that you are going through. Not only that, chances are that you find a skill in which you could achieve expertise in a very short amount of time.

So, go ahead and start that new habit. Something you can do. More importantly find those thirty minutes of the day that you can dedicate for yourself and the little bit of practice that makes you the perfect person.