Time is a precious gift.

We only get a set amount.

These are the opening lyrics to a song almost none of you have heard before, but I hope that someday you will.

Before I found myself measuring my life in seconds, minutes, weeks, and months—before I started my sentence—I didn’t think much about the concept of time. Honestly, I feel like I tried my best to live a busy life in order to avoid thinking too much about anything. Days slid into days, years into years, and I never appreciated the magnitude of what a gift time was. In my mind, the concept of “time” was like the underwear and socks I got on Christmas as a child. Seemed pretty meaningless as a little kid, but these days I look forward to having socks without holes in them. Maybe that’s what growing up does; it gives you perspective on the minutiae of existence. Or maybe it’s that prison has colored my view of time as a concept since time is exactly what prison has taken from me.

Throughout human history, crime has been punished with physical pain or disfigurement. Lashings, tattoos, amputations, hard labor, and even slavery in some cultures, but we’re “civilized” now, right? No more torture. Now we just take the most valuable things of all. I’d gladly adorn a pot leaf branded on my cheek to show the world how dangerous I must be rather than give up my time, but they don’t give us that option. So here I am, giving society sixty months of the time gifted to me. All that remains are the choices I have on how to spend this time.

Cue the magic button.

We’ve all pressed the magic button in our minds. You know what button I’m talking about. The button that gives us that million dollars, that makes that crush notice us, that takes cancer away from the person we love. In prison, that button has a fast-forward symbol emblazoned on top of it. “If you could press that button and magically be at the end of your sentence, would you press it?” Before, when I first arrived, and for a majority of the guys here, the answer is, “Give me that damn button,” but as for me now? Things have changed.

I still remember my friend, G, the co-writer of the song I started this blog with, telling me he wouldn’t press the button. I thought he was crazy. When he explained his reasoning, I’d heard what he said, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand his mindset. How the fuck could anyone want to experience being locked up? How could a prison sentence be possibly beneficial?

A lot of inmates do their best to press that fast-forward button. The easiest and most common way is to sleep the bid away. I know plenty of men that sleep sixteen plus hours a day. To them, this is how they “get” the man. Others work prison jobs—meaningless tasks that make the time pass quicker—which is the way promoted by our captors to turn us into good boys who will get out of prison and work the jobs that no one wants for less pay, all the while saying, “Thank you for the opportunity.” A lot of guys go this route, figure it’s good enough. Not for me. I want more for my time, for the gift of my time.

Perception is one of the most undervalued tools in human consciousness. You don’t need to take a class or read a self-help book to utilize the unique ability we all have to simply change how we view a situation. In most cases, our perceptions change unconsciously. Example: a girl, who we loved dearly five seconds ago, is now a cheating whore because we found her sending nudes to our best friend. One second we were thinking about wedding rings, and the next she is, was, and always will be a whore. Our perception changed not only in the present, but in the past and future as well. I feel what many of us—prisoners, free people, and humans in general—fail to realize is that we can change our perceptions consciously. My circumstances over the last 10 months have been horrendous. Being locked behind a door with no view of the outside, no feeling of the sun on my skin, no breath of fresh air, no verbal or physical contact with the people I love, has nearly broken me. I know my readers have also experienced drastically changed circumstances in the last 10 months, not just from COVID, but from the endless ups and downs of ordinary life. Without the innate ability we all have to adapt to our surroundings, to consciously change my perceptions about my experience, I’m sure I would have been broken irreparably.

I’ll miss prison. I’ll miss being locked behind this door. No, I don’t want to stay here, and no I don’t love it here, but I will miss it because it’s taken my time. I’ve used my gift on this experience. I can never “get” the man by sleeping my time away. I can never “get” the man at all. There is no man; there is only me. They might have taken 60 months of my time with my family, friends, and the outside world away from me, but they can’t take that time away from me with myself, my ideas, and my mind. They can’t keep my mind away from being free. They can’t keep me from growing, creating, preparing, learning, and experiencing. Prison has become my escape, has become a tool that has taught me more about myself than anything else has done before.

Most of the people reading this will thankfully never experience prison, but I know that to those in their homes and apartments, quarantine and everything that comes with it may seem like a kind of prison. To you all, I would encourage a change in perception. Learn about yourself. Find things out that you never knew. Take this time as a break from everyday life that eats up our precious, limited time. No matter what, we will never get this time back. There are only so many minutes on all of our clocks, and they’re always ticking. It’s up to us to use our time the best that we can. Regulations, social distancing, mask mandates, and all of the new words that define our new world can only affect the quality of the experience we have with our time if we allow it to.

Take it from a prisoner: there is no rewind button, and one day your gift of time will run out.