Ep.31: We're All Living on Bonus Time

In this episode I introduce the concept of bonus time: a hack for orienting ourselves to time in a way that makes our moments more precious and our actions more powerful — especially in times of ecological crisis. On the eve of an important birthday I ponder human mortality, the blessings of close calls, and the chance for each of us to make a difference while we still have time. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Wake Up Human Podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Wills, and in this episode I'm going to be exploring the juicy, tantalizing concept of bonus time. What is bonus time? It's a way of perceiving time such that if we live by it, it can make our days more precious, our actions more powerful, and our lives more meaningful. Curious to hear more about it? Would you like to have some bonus time in your life? Yeah, me too. So come join me on the inside and I'll tell you how you can get it. See you there. Welcome to the Wake Up Human Podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing, what we have lost, and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Ding. If you heard last episode, you know I talked about the power of being raw, where I spoke about the importance of deprogramming ourselves from the shoulds that we put upon ourselves when we let cultural programming tell us how we should show up in life and how that can undermine our ability to express and contribute our gifts to the world. I consider this episode on bonus time a continuation of that one, a light continuation, in that it continues to explore some of the psychological reframes that can help us drop programming that keeps us separated from ourselves and each other and rebuild and strengthen our connections with ourselves and each other and the world. Showing up more raw is one way to do that, and exploring our relationship to time is another one. So here I'm going to unpack the concept of bonus time as one of those reframes that shifts us from habitual ways of perceiving our relationship to the world and opens us up to kind of fresh spaces that are that give us permission to go beyond just what we're used to and really ask who are we really as human beings and how are we supposed to live? But this episode is relatively lighthearted, relatively, not entirely. I'll tell some stories about some parental figures in my life who helped introduce and also drive home the importance of bonus time to me. And along the way, I'll weave in some explorations on themes of ecology, ancestry, and also our role and responsibility as the current living humans to determine the future that all future humans get to live in. That's kind of a big deal. This episode, like many of my episodes, is quite personal. I often hear it said that the personal is universal, that when we tell our own personal stories, the more specific they are, the more others can relate to them. It's a little bit ironic, but I find it's true. I agree with this. As I tell my stories, I'm telling them with the trust that they'll land for you as a fellow human being. I'm looking forward to sharing some perspectives and hopefully some inspirations that will help you consider your life's timeline in a fresh way. Maybe ask yourself some fresh questions about what's most important to you right now, and consider whether you're living the life that's most true to you. Spending your time the way you most want to spend it or in ways that bring you joy. And if not, what you might like to try next? What might feel more raw for you? More alive. Anyway, let's finally talk about bonus time. If you're ecologically minded, you may think when I say the term bonus time, that I'm referring to the fact that we're at a certain level of ecological collapse. And truly, we do not know how much time we have before the planet may warm beyond the level that can sustain life as we know it. And that a very real, more full ecological collapse could be forthcoming. Not to call out doom at the very beginning of the episode, but I mean this is this is this is the world we're living in right now. And I am going to speak about it because how can we have any conversation about bonus time or time in a time like this without including that frame, right? Like what kind of time is available for life on this planet and what kind of time is available for us as human beings to be able to do something about it, right? But that's not what I'm gonna start with. What I want to start with is a more mundane, if you will, definition of bonus time. And I'm gonna start by telling a story. Back in 2011, my stepfather, Butch, passed away. He died due to a congenital lung condition that was due to nothing that he had chosen or or done or actions, you know, he wasn't a smoker. He didn't do anything to his lungs to cause himself to become afflicted with that condition. It was something that was part of his family lineage. And I believe he was 65 when he died, which was way too young. And when we held his memorial, I decided to stand up and read a letter that I had written to him, or about him. And it was as I sat and thought, what do I want to write about him? What do I want to say about this man who basically was a stand-in as my father for 20 years, uh over 20 years, and someone who I loved dearly and respected and appreciated very much. I thought, you know, how does someone talk about someone so important in their lives, you know, and do them justice and honor? And what I decided to do was tell a story about Butch and bonus time. So a story that he told me is, you know, when I would talk about time and, you know, wanting to make decisions about what I should do with my life and how to make the most of opportunities, all of that, he said to me a couple of times, you know, when I was young, well, why don't you just think about the fact that all the time that you have right now is bonus time, and then just act accordingly. You can live by bonus time. All your priorities will be in order, and then all your decisions will be easier that way. And what he meant by that was when he was a youngster, I think he was maybe eight or nine or ten years old. He was up in a tree, and he was playing in the tree, climbing the tree, and he accidentally put his hands on a power line, both of his hands on the power line, and he was shocked. He was shocked very badly. And he almost died. And he felt that he had positive near-death experience. And he felt so surprised and grateful that he had lived, that he hadn't died, that he told himself, even at that young age, you know, I can't believe I lived through this, I'm so fortunate. Everything else I have, every other time I have in the future is gonna be bonus time. I could have died, I didn't, I'm living on bonus time now, baby. And that was something that he carried throughout his life. It was a f a certain type of gratitude, a certain type of recognition that every moment that he had was precious, was extra. And I'm not saying that he always lived that way, but he did, I think, endeavor to return himself back to that perspective whenever he had a chance. So when I spoke at his memorial, I told this story about bonus time and how inspiring it had been to me, and how it helped me think about time in a different way, to never take for granted the amount of time that we have, because we don't know how much time we have. And I already had a perspective around that because I was a big fan of the movie Dead Poet Society. That's my favorite movie of all time. And if you've seen Dead Poet Society, you know that basically the mantra of that movie movie is Carpadium, Seize the Day. And I very much took that on as a mantra for myself as well. Seize the day, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, make your life extraordinary. Don't miss the opportunity to live fully while you have it because you don't know how long you have. But when Butch died, it drove it home in another way. Because he had always specifically named that carpe diem time as bonus time. So I spoke about that. I told some other funny stories about him and the way that he had lived his life, and felt I did the best that I could do to honor him with my words. And then after Butch's memorial, I found myself thinking a lot about bonus time and how to live bonus time in my own way and how to honor him through that process because I very much wanted to honor his life and the life that he didn't get to live. And I also knew I wanted to take advantage of my own bonus time. And so I started thinking in terms like that, and I thought about stories in my life where I also had close calls with experiences where I very possibly couldn't have not made it through. You know, there's an example one example of when I first moved to Denver, I was working at my my very first job in the city, and I was leaving work and I had parked across a very, very, very busy road, like a something like a six-lane or eight-lane road. And I was crossing the road, not at a crosswalk, not at a stoplight. I thought I'll just run across the road, and I could see that there was nobody coming from either direction, so I went to run. But here's the thing: there was actually somebody coming from the other direction. There were some cars that were parked or stopped ready to turn, like waiting to turn left. And there was a whole other lane of traffic that I didn't know that was there that I couldn't see. And as I was running across the road, I ran and I ran right in front of a car. And the car was speeding. I mean, it was probably I I think that the speed limit there was probably 45 miles an hour, something like that. So the car was probably going 50 miles an hour. And as I was running, I looked to my right and I saw the car just completely out of nowhere, complete surprise, just bearing down on me. It was it was right on top of me. I didn't even have time to think because I already had the momentum of my run, and so I kept running while I was looking at this car. But I got to the other side of the road, I put my foot on the sidewalk, and just as I did, the car s whooshed behind me. I mean, it was just feet behind me. And if I had started running just like one second or two seconds later, that car would have absolutely smashed me. And I stopped and I stood there. I think I was like 19 years old. I stopped and I stood there and just went, wow. You need to be really, really, really way more careful, girl. It it was one of those things that happened so quickly that I didn't even have time for my heart to beat fast. I just stopped and was shocked and realized that I had just almost died. And then I walked to my car and I drove home. But those moments stick. Those moments stick. I could have died. I was 19. I could have died right then and there. And all the years that I've lived in between, all that bonus time would have been none. Would have been nothing. All the good times, the bad times, the heartbreak, the incredibly beautiful emotional highs, the learning, the experiences, the travel, the relationships, the friendships, the stumbles, the mistakes, the misses, the falls on my face, none of it would have happened. So it's really something to think about. And that's not the only one. There's other examples of my life where I was close very close to having died, and I escaped by the skin of my teeth. And I imagine that you may have some examples of that in your own life as well. It's worth stopping to think about those. And you know, these things happen just by way of living our everyday lives. We never know. It could be tomorrow. Okay, so there's enough of my spiel about bonus time. You get why I'm talking about it. Now let me talk about why I'm talking about it right now. Yes, it's another story. My biological mother, her name was Holly. I haven't talked about her much on or at all on this podcast. She is the reason that I came into the world. She's the reason I exist at all. And she died when she was 53 years old. 53 years old in a couple of months. She died from cancer. She had a tough illness to overcome, and she didn't overcome it. And one of the things about Holly is that, you know, I met her when I was 25 years old. We didn't know each other during the time that I was growing up. And when we met, we realized there were so many things that were similar about us. Everything from, you know, I had so much of her, her voice and her laugh and her mannerisms, her way of moving, her handwriting. I inherited her artistic talents. I think she was much even more talented than me, but I definitely inherited talents from her. And even our minds worked in similar ways. We had thoughts that were similar to one another's thought patterns that I hadn't experienced with anyone else in my life. And in addition to that, we also shared this really interesting experience of certain things having happened having happened to us at certain times in our lives that mirrored one another. So, for example, this is just one example. She had taken an art class in her early 20s where she had made an abstract painting of two faces looking at one another. But you couldn't tell they were two faces looking at one another because it was an abstract painting. So you really had to know that they were faces, or she had to tell you they were faces. And then once you look at that and you knew that they were two faces, it was a there was a woman on the left and a man on the right, and you would look at that and then you could see, oh, of course, there's two faces. But it wasn't obvious until you knew. And what's so interesting is that in my early 20s, I had also made a painting of two faces. It was the same painting: a woman on the left, a man on the right. It was an abstract painting. And also it wasn't obvious that there were two faces unless you knew that. It was very different. Hers was more cubist and more primary colors. Mine was um more of like a flowing watercolor with a bit of a psychedelic vibe to it. But there was no question she had made a painting of the same subject matter that I had at the same age. And of course, we didn't find that out until later. That kind of thing was just shocking to me. And there were other things that happened throughout our lives. I won't give all of the details, but I began to feel that there was a certain cadence to her life that my life was repeating. Well, when she died at 53, you can imagine what I what I thought, what I wondered, and what I worried. Wow, does this mean that I might die at 53 as well? Well, guess what? Guess what's happening this month? Yeah, that's right, I'm gonna be 53. And at the end of the year, in December, I'm gonna be 53 in a couple of months, which is the age she was when she died. Now, I'm healthy, I'm strong, I'm not sick the way she was when she turned 53. And nonetheless, I can't help but have that thought that the life I get to live after 53 in a couple of months feels like bonus time. And it's really got me thinking. It's got me thinking about honoring Holly, whose life was cut so short at 53. There's all that bonus time she didn't get. And then I'm looking at how do I honor that? I've always been interested to honor her and honor my lineage in the way that I live because m she was limited by culture and opportunities in many ways, in the same way that my grandmother was before her, and my great-grandmother was before her. And there are so many things that they weren't capable to do or didn't feel they could do, or truly just weren't allowed to do. Whereas I have had a different life and I've been able to be much more free, I've had much more opportunity, much more ability to choose and to live according to my own agency. Not perfectly, but much more than they were able to. And so I've always felt a bit of um a responsibility to live my life absolutely fully in honor of those women who brought me into the world who weren't able to live as fully as I believe that they well, as they should have been able to live. And so I ask myself now, if I look at every day after 53 as bonus time, however much time I have left, I want it to mean something. I want it to mean something for me, and I want it to mean something for those who came before me. And I want it to be for good. So you can see why I'm bringing this up now. Ideally, we think this way every single day. We ask ourselves, what do I want to do with the time that I have? What how can I show up in the world in the most helpful way, knowing that I have such a short time on this planet, this beautiful place? How can I be a force for good while I'm here? Yes, of course, it would be ideal if we could be thinking about that a lot every day, and living in that space of gratitude. And as we all know, that's not so easy. That's not the way that the human mind works. We get pulled into minutia, we get pulled into small concerns, and then culture comes in on top of that, modern culture, and pulls us even further into fragmentation and urgency and overwhelm and divisive rhetoric and all the things that come in and take the place of what could be opening our eyes in wonder and gratitude and awe for the gift of being alive every single day. So, one of the things I wanted to bring to this episode were these stories and just this reminder of how important it is to live every single day to the fullest, because life is so precious. And we truly, truly do not know how long we have. More imminent or maybe even unavoidable. And so I find myself asking today, related to bonus time, with these signs of collapse, with these concerns and this heartbreak and this grief that I feel that so many of us feel. Not just, oh, how can I live my life every every day to the fullest before I die because I don't know how long I have? The question is different. It is really, what's the most helpful thing I can do? You know? What is the most helpful thing that I can do for the world with the time that I have left? And I've I've asked that in some type of way many, many times and throughout my life. It's not that this is a new question. But the thing is that the the answer to that question, what's the most helpful thing I can do right now, might be different than what the most helpful thing was that I could do last year or five years ago or 10 years ago or 30 years ago. And so I feel it's very important for us to ask and to keep asking. What is the most helpful thing that I can do now? Don't use yesterday's definition, don't use last year's definition. We see what's happening in the world now, and things are changing so quickly. So it's worth continuing to ask in real time. Things like, what is the most helpful way that I can use my voice? Where is the most helpful place I can live? What are the most helpful conversations I can have? Uh what is the most helpful thing I can do for the person next to me? What's the most helpful thing I can do online in the online space? And then what's the most helpful thing I can do for myself in this time? How can I care for myself? This bonus time means something very different than it did to Butch at a young age in, say, 1955. It was such a different world then. And it was a different world even when I was young. It was a different world in the 90s. In the early 90s, when I was in high school, I was part of a group called Tree, Teens for the Restoration of Earth's Environment. We made up the name of the group ourselves, and we were very proud of it. And we were passionate about the environment, about animals, about trees, about protecting and preserving ecological resources. And there were a lot of groups around in different cities and states at that time, not of tree, but of teenagers who felt really hopeful about our ability to be able to make change. And it was such a different time in one way because we knew that time felt short. We knew there was a hole in the ozone layer. We knew that, you know, CFCs and paint was causing that hole to get bigger. And so we shouldn't be using that paint. We knew that we needed to recycle, although recycling turned out to be a huge scam built by the petroleum industries, but that's a different conversation. So it was the beginning of a lot of there was ecological hope and there was ecological trauma beginning all at that same time there. And the thing is, we knew that time was short. We felt the deadline looming, but we still had time. We knew we had time. There was time to make a change. There were time for laws to change, for governments to change, for environmental regulations to change. There were possibilities. It's a different world now. Those things didn't change. Those governments didn't do what they were supposed to do. Those leaders didn't do what they needed to do. Those laws didn't change. Laws that could have protected and could have changed were undone, dismantled, avoided, ignored. The level of ecological crisis right now is much higher than it was 30, 35 years ago. The choices we need to make now are different. So I'm not here to stand on my soapbox anymore. In fact, if Butch even heard me talking about this, he would say I was on my soapbox. And he would be furious with me. And he might even threaten to take away my keys to my car, right? He was so upset when I would talk about potential ecological catastrophe and try to suggest that we make changes to live differently so that the future world could be spared from a potential destruction. He was very upset about that. And the reason he was upset about that is not because he didn't believe me or see accuracy in what I was saying. It's because he did not want me to show that mirror to such an extent that he would have to look in that mirror and ask himself whether what he was doing was potentially harmful to the world. He specifically told me that. That is too painful for me to consider. I don't want to take on the hardship that I would have to take on to be able to participate in the world in a different way, to be able to make different choices and show up differently. Even if I do want that future to be different. But if we take a step back and ask about bonus time, well, there could be a really selfish way to look at bonus time, isn't there? If we say, you know, my bonus time is important to me, I'm gonna wake up every single morning and I'm gonna live as fully as I can because I want my life to be the best that it can be. And that's all fine. But what that ignores or fails to recognize is that if we're only making choices to do the best thing for ourselves, we might be not making the best choice for the world. But the beautiful flip side of that is that when we make the choices to do the most helpful thing for the world, we're also making a choice to do the most helpful thing for ourselves. And this is a relational and communal way of viewing the world that the Western world has not grown up with. Butch's generation did not grow up with that. His generation grew up with the mentality that it's each man for his own and it's competitive out there, and it's dog eat dog, and you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That was the world that he grew up in. And so it makes sense that even your bonus time, you take it just for yourself, you know, because you don't know if you're gonna get any more and there's a scarcity. So you gotta grab onto that and use it and, you know, go to Africa and go trophy hunting or buy yourself a boat so you can feel the wind in your hair. Not that there's anything wrong with boats, but thinking of bonus time as something that gives us the opportunity to buy more or do more for ourselves only. That's very different than saying my time is linked to the time of everyone else's time on this planet, my choices are linked to the choices of everyone else on this planet, and what I do for me and for my benefit needs to also be done for the benefit of the world. Of course, we need to ask, what do I need to do for myself? What is the best thing I can do for my health, for my longevity, for my inner peace, for my family, for those I care for? But then that needs to extend. It has to extend into the question, what can I do for the world? Because when I ask, what can I do for the world, I'm asking, what can I do for myself, you see? So sorry, Butch, there was my soapbox. You'll never have to hear me try to force you to eat albacore instead of tuna ever again. So as I approach this momentous birthday, I'm thinking about Holly, I'm thinking about Butch, I'm thinking about the planet, I'm thinking about the tuna, I'm thinking about bonus time. But I don't mean for this conversation to be distressing, I mean for it to be inspiring. Because as much as unknown as there is right now about the planet, the world, the the ecological health of the planet and of the human world and the more than human world, there is truly still hope. We can truly still show up, each one of us, asking what is the best thing I can do now? What are the gifts that I've been given? For example, I look at the gifts that I've been given from Holly, the gift of Gab, the gift of the voice, the gift of the creatrix, the gift of the artist, the gift of the philosophical mind. How can I use those in service to something greater than me, to the future that I want to be a part of creating? And in doing so I honor those who came before me. I honor my ancestors. We are the people that our ancestors prayed for to choose a different way. So let's choose. Let's play the game we want to play. I'll see your carpe diem and I'll raise you bonus time, and we're gonna find that we both hold in our hands a full house of gifts and talents and experience and wisdom, and we still have cards to play. And I would say the worst thing that we could possibly do with our bonus time right now is to give up. The worst thing that we could do is put down our hand and fold. So let's stay in the game, friend. In closing, bringing it back to Butch, one of the things he said about his experience of almost being electrocuted and then living the rest of his life on bonus time is he said it made him unafraid. He felt that he was able to be boldly unafraid in his life in a lot of ways, because he had already come to the edge of death and passed it, and he already considered himself to be on bonus time. And that had helped him to make some decisions that were bold and courageous in his life and that served him well. And I believe that even though his life was cut short, he died with no regrets, or a very few anyway. The bonus time perspective really helped him out. And so I ask myself, what if I were also boldly unafraid, living courageously, unapologetically, full out I don't know how long I have, but I'm pretty sure that if I do that now, whether it's a couple months down the road or a couple years or a couple of decades, I'll be glad that I did. So I suggest being grateful and going all in on our lives, showing up for ourselves and for others exactly the way we want to. And to think about our lives and all those potential close calls or near misses and the things that have happened in the past that had they happened just a little bit differently, you wouldn't even be here to live this day. We can find that appreciation, and in that place of appreciation, we can really ask, how do I want to live this bonus time? How do I want to make it matter? Thanks, Butch. Thanks, Holly, and thanks to life for giving me and all of us a shot. Thanks for the bonus time. May we humans do right by the world. That's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. To learn more about me and Wake Up Human, you can find me on my website at ShannonWills.com. And you can also find me on Substack at wakeuphuman.substack.com. If you know someone who would like this episode or enjoy it or benefit, please pass this on to them. This podcast is a labor of love for me, and I'm thrilled when it can be of benefit to someone else. And if you love this podcast, please give me a review. Anywhere you give podcast reviews, it would mean the world to me to help me get this podcast out to more people. Thank you again so much for listening, and may your life be filled with bonus time.