Roses, Music and Musings

Ahh…I have had this idea for years. Germinating in my head and in my heart. Unfortunately, in spite of a few attempts, these ideas never really left the imagination world.

The usual suspects stopped me: fear and lack of time.

‘Fear’ is universal: it’s a natural, instinctive, primal, and often a life-saving emotion and feeling. However, it is its management that I’m pondering on. I realised something wasn’t right when fear became part of my everyday life and would creep up even while performing mundane actions. Even worse, I let fear overtake me to the point that it would dampen my dreams and steal the sparkles I envisioned for my future.

Now, ‘Time’ is another big topic (hence the capital ‘T’ I allowed myself to use) and the focus of this entry. As I get older, I realise more and more how much of a privilege, and how valuable it is as a resource. I’m also realizing how irritating, revolting, and unbearable the statement “we all have 24 hours” is. I can’t stand to hear this anymore.

Yes. Many of us have heard this ‘shallow-wanna-be-deep‘ statement.
While this line is sometimes used in a clumsy attempt to inspire or to impress others, more often than not, there is an underlying willingness to shame people into doing more, assuming they are not putting everything into their power to better their situation (how do you know ?).

Let’s take a seat (and a cup of tea) and see why this ‘we all have 24 hours‘ myth is a bit toxic, relatively flawed, and clearly uncompassionate.

Technically, the majority of humanity does use a time system where the length of a day is 24 hours, but there’s a harmful rhetoric behind “we all have 24 hours“. A rhetoric that reeks of privilege blindness and is rooted in the illusion of a perfect meritocratic system. My issue with this statement is that it totally ignores the parameters of realities that make those 24 hours look quite different from one person to another.
This statement is nothing more than a short-sighted vision of equal opportunity, which completely ignores factors such as disparities in terms of access to resources, wealth, network, social capital, health status, and much more.

The intended sassiness behind this phrase strikes me as ridiculous. A ridiculous display of ignorance at worst, and at best, a lack of deep and critical thinking. For this statement to work, we would need, among other things, a world of equal opportunities and equal access to resources. Which is not the case (yet?). There is no reason to mask the inequalities and to edulcorate the complexities of our modern societies.

Those 24 hours are granted to us, but how one gets to use these 24 hours depends on many factors and … a bit of magic (maybe I’ll explore that in a future post).
There are simple things we tend to overlook, such as health (physical and mental), the capacity to move around, to have access to safe, affordable, and reliable public transport, access to a support system that can help get projects off the ground, or friends that could simply help with groceries or proofreading, connections, access to childcare, … to name a few.

Think of these situations and tell me if their 24 hours will look the same :

1) a person dealing with a chronic illness that impacts their daily life,

2) a healthy, financially comfortable youngster with good connections and a supportive family,

3) a first-generation student with limited resources who has to study and financially support a family,

4) a single mother without a car and no immediate family around to help,

5) a person living in an unsafe, remote village with little access to clean water or reliable electric infrastructures,

6) a successful business owner who has access to chefs, chauffeurs, powerful connection,s and personal assistants,

7) a person with a low-paying job who is also a parent to 3 children,

8) a person with a high-intensity, demanding, and emotionally charged job, with limited social connections.

24 hours feel different when most of your time is stretched to be able to cover basic needs and necessities, when you are living in remote places or are dealing with isolation, or when the market reduces an hour worth of your life (done labouring) to a meagre financial reward. When the market pushes you to give away more and more of your time to afford basic necessities, it takes on a different dimension. In this case, 24 hours tastes different, and the aftertaste is even more sour when someone blurts out that we all have the same 24 hours.

By this point, I’m sure you get it. 24 hours can look vastly different from one person to another. Your 24 hours don’t look like the 24 hours of the top 5%. Once you understand it, you stop being so hard on yourself, you have more compassion for yourself and for others, you can start appreciating your daily efforts a bit more, and you can stop comparing yourself to others (hopefully it also makes you want to stand up for more equality and a fairer distribution of resources! ). And please, please, please, don’t forget the power of community. Ask for help, build connections, share tips, pool resources….

All of this brings me to a simple truth we should no longer be afraid to name: not everyone gets to enjoy the same freedom when it comes to using their 24 hours.
Some people start the day with space, support, safety, and options. Others start it already exhausted, already stretched, and have to spend their day negotiating survival.

This doesn’t mean dreams are meaningless, nor that faith, determination, or discipline don’t matter. They do. Deeply. But they do not exist in a vacuum. They operate within systems, structures, and realities that can be profoundly unequal.

Recognising this is not pessimism. It’s clarity. And clarity allows compassion: for ourselves and for others.

After years of feeling like time was passing me by, I’m now choosing and trying my best to use my 24 hours more intentionally, with the resources that I have, while trying to keep my head above the water. It feels amazing to start appreciating each second and to stop measuring my life against timelines that were not built for me. I’m nurturing healthy, loving, enriching, and meaningful connections, contributing and helping wherever I can, asking for help when I need to, and building a life that makes sense for me, a life that feels and is aligned, not performative.

That’s what I want to do with my 24 hours.

This blog is part of that choice. I’ve had this in my mind and in my heart for so long… It is now, finally, seeing the world! A way of reclaiming my time, my voice, and my attention.
Not to prove anything. But to live more truthfully.

I’m now reclaiming my time, reclaiming my life, and starting my website !

Welcome aboard ❤️ !