Everyone knows that time is valuable, that the clock is ticking away on all of us.

“We’re all dying, some of us a little sooner than others.” as my brother reminded me the other day, in what turned out to be a depressing conversation.

The reality is that we’re all dying. But until that final second actually happens and the clock stops, the inverse is also true: the reality is that we’re all living. So how do you want to spend the rest of your life?

“Don’t just spend the afternoon, spend the afternoon,” the writer Annie Dillard says. She means that we should all consider time as currency, with real spending potential, and think about how to maximize our minutes accordingly. This shouldn’t be a problem for all you cryptocurrency freaks, who are used to thinking about money – and time – in unconventional ways.

For 2018, I’ve distilled my list of what I consider to be the most valuable use of my time to what I’m calling my Top Five. These values are going to shape how I spend my days, one minute at a time. They will also shape how I post to Steemit, and what I post about.

Fair warning: I’ve doubled up on a few related values; don’t even bother trying to call me out on it because I’ve already decided that this is a legit way to squeeze in a few more things that matter.

Top Five for 2018

1. Family

I’ve got a family – a big one, in my case, my own husband and kids, and lots of siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews. My family is awesome and I like them. And more to the point, I need them. Faith also comes into the picture here. Both my parents and my husband’s parents are religious, and it was important to them that they pass on the values of their faith to their kids, so that their kids could offer the same heritage to their children, and so on. Here in the 21st century, religion has a bad reputation -- for understandable reasons -- but what is not often discussed is how religious values, when practiced with integrity and humanity, can offer a fantastic framework for a life, well-lived.

2. Community

It’s true that, with the internet (not to mention the relatively cheap cost of travel), we live in a global community. It’s also true that you can build a very real sense of community online, whether it be here on Steemit or wherever your favorite corner of the internet exists. But what about your community in the physical space you occupy, the place where you live, work, and hang out? How many of us have any real sense of who our neighbors are, or who the particular people are who actually run your community? This could mean town or borough government, schools, committees, councils. It also means the fun stuff: meeting up with locals to celebrate local festivals and holidays -- events specific to your community with people you know. In America at least (and probably many other cultures in the West), this sense of community has been stretched to the breaking point, as we spend our days driving from one place to another, with our leisure time spent inside our oversized houses, mainlining entertainment through our tiny devices or giant TVs (or just mainlining, according to the statistics about the opioid crisis in the U.S.).

Folk dancing at the Madden Road Music Fest at our family farm. Good times. [Photo by @jrue]

Just some ladies from my community, hanging out in the neighborhood, listening to music on a cool evening in early summer.

3. Food

Admittedly, it’s weird to consider food to be a personal value, as that’s like saying “air” or “water”. I mean, without food we’re all gonna die a bit faster, so of course we need food. It’s in the Top Five of the everyone on the planet. But again – and maybe this is another one that mostly applies to life in America – our food is pretty gross. Food has been commodified into food products, mass-produced and riddled with chemicals before being distributed across great distances. While modern food production has contributed to great abundance, has also contributed to a terrible disconnect from how food grows: processes as basic as moving from seed to plant to food to compost. Not knowing where our food comes from and who grows it (along with the accountability that comes with that) means that we fail to understand the most fundamental aspect of being human. Instead of developing into adults with a fully-formed sense of agency about what we put in our mouths, we never quite leave babyhood, dependent on some distant and unknowable authority to mete out and regulate our food consumption. And then there is the matter of community in relation to food, the question of whether or not we are breaking bread with other people, sitting elbow to elbow at the communal table. This matters every bit as much as what we eat.

Arrowhead Farm, one of the oldest farms in the U.S., shows up each week at our local farmers' market.

4. Books & Music

Reading is my favorite thing to do in the world, though I do less and less of it as I grow older. I would like to change this, and already have a hefty list of titles to work through this coming year. And, as an added bonus, since I am a writer, everything I read becomes an education in my craft. One of the biggest projects I have lined up for 2018 is the release of a book called Rome: A Day. My friend Mary was born and raised in Rome as the daughter of a couple of ex-pat Americans; her dad was a sculptor who came to Rome to study for six months and stayed for nearly sixty years. Mary illustrated Rome: A Day out of her deep connection to the city, and I wrote the text that accompanies her artwork. We plan to have a party to celebrate the book’s launch, where we’ll eat lots of crispy pizza and pretend that our small New England town is Rome for an hour or two.

Just one of the many bookshelves in our house. There's no way I'll get through all the books I want to read in my lifetime but at least I'll have a good time trying...

Music is connected to books in the sense that both are a part of what I consume (so to speak) and what I create. My brother is a songwriter, and we grew up singing together with our siblings. As adults, we continue to make music, having released an EP of his songs and built what we call a micro music festival on our family farm in Ohio. Music will play a central role in 2018, with the music festival happening in August and the release of original songs from my brother at @danieldyemusic.

The Castros, a band who came to last year's Madden Road Music Fest, know how to put on a show. [Photo by @jrue]

5. Nature

Nature as one of my Top Five values is such a broad category that it almost (almost!) feels like cheating to list it. But the natural world can be so absent from our lives that it doesn’t seem crazy to say that we need to keep declaring, over and over again, that connecting with nature is central to maintaining (and developing) a sense of humanity. When I fail to do something as simple as take a walk on a regular basis, my entire sense of well-being is undermined. Understanding that you inhabit the physical world, even as you cultivate your soul, means that you never quite lose sight of mortality. So it all comes around again to death: “from dust you came and to dust you shall return”. May we make the most of our dust in the meantime; I’m plan on giving it a shot.

How about you? What are your Top Five values? How do you spend your time?

These are a few of my favorite things: my family enjoying the natural world.