That week was drawing to its end.

It hadn't been an ordinary week. It was a confusing mixture of pressure and tension, full of disappointments and short on victories.

What wore me down wasn't only the lack of sleep, nor the need for rest. It was something deeper than that. Many questions stayed with me like a shadow all week long.

After a long night, I woke to the voice of my daughter Razane, knocking on my bedroom door.

I told her in a tired voice: Come in.

She came in while I was still caught between sleep and waking. I lifted my head with difficulty and looked at her. Her whole face was alert, as if she carried news that couldn't wait.

She said to me: Do you know where we're going today, Dad?

I answered with a single word: No.

She said: We're going to Nour and Niema's birthday party.

Nour and Na'ma are my sister's daughters. Twins.

I told her: That's good.

And inside, I felt a relief I didn't try to hide from myself. They would go, and I would stay alone.

Completely alone.

I got up, we had breakfast, and the time passed the way it does on a weekend. A little conversation, a little tidying of the house, and a light waiting for the moment to leave.

After lunch, I took them to a shop to buy the birthday gifts, then to my sister's house.

And on the way back, that inner dialogue began without asking permission. It didn't wait for me to reach home. It began there, on the road.

As if the road wasn't leading me home only, but leading me to myself.

I entered the house.

I made tea, took a blank sheet of paper and a pen. I sat at the table and drew a large table, dividing it into two columns. One for the problems, one for the causes.

I began with the problems column. I wanted first to see what had actually happened, not what I had wished would happen.

I wrote the first problem, then the second…

The problems I wrote down circled around two clear points.

The first was not being able to finish tasks on time.

I would give each task a set amount of time, then discover, within the day, that the time wasn't enough. A task would stretch a little, pushing the one after it, and so the whole schedule would begin to slip from its place.

The second was the drop in energy and the scattering of attention.

I began the plan with clear resolve, but I couldn't hold the same strength. Sleep was a problem, and its lack showed in my body and mind together. Then tension came to add weight upon weight. And whenever the time blocks tangled, and I felt I hadn't accomplished what I should, my energy drained further, and my attention split between what I was doing now and what I had left hanging behind me.

I looked at the two problems together, and felt they were saying the same thing, but in two different forms.

Time isn't enough the way I imagined.

And energy doesn't stay the way it began.

And attention doesn't remain clear just because I drew a column for it in the table.

Then I moved to the causes column.

I didn't want to fill it quickly. I wanted to slow down a little with what I had written in the problems column.

Why wasn't the time enough? Why did the energy drop? And why did the attention scatter?

I began with time.

I asked myself: why did the time seem so tight? Why didn't it widen to hold what I had placed inside it?

At first, I thought the mistake was only in estimating the duration of tasks. And perhaps that was partly true. But when I returned to the details of the week, I remembered something else, deeper than misjudgment.

The time I assigned to each block wasn't as pure as I had imagined.

The hour wasn't always a full hour, and the two hours weren't two pure hours for the task I had written in the table.

There were small interruptions everywhere. A question from one of the children, a request from the family, a call from a colleague, a message from a friend, a matter at home, something sudden that doesn't appear in the schedule, but enters the day and takes its place without asking permission.

That was when I began to understand that what I called my time wasn't mine alone.

I was treating it as though it belonged to me alone, as though I could distribute it however I wished, then ask life to respect that distribution.

But reality was saying something else.

My time is not mine alone.

It is shared property, in a way, and everyone wants a portion of it. Work wants. The family wants. The children want. Friends want. The house wants. And even the body, when it tires, comes too to claim its right.

And here I paused a little.

The sentence was painful and clear at the same time.

I had planned, from the very beginning, on a false assumption. I had treated what is shared as though it were private. I took the day and placed it before me as though it were private property, then began distributing it among my projects, my desires, and my goals, without noticing that there were other parties who had a right to it too.

The mistake wasn't that I planned.

The mistake was that I planned as though I were alone in life.

As though work would ask nothing of me outside its hours. As though the children wouldn't knock on the door in a moment of focus. As though the house wouldn't need a glance, as though a phone wouldn't ring, as though the body wouldn't tire. As though relationships could always wait until I finished what I wanted.

I thought I was distributing my time.

Then I discovered I was distributing a time that wasn't mine alone.

And when you treat shared property as though it were private, you are bound to collide with reality. Not because reality is against you, but because you didn't count the others' share of it.

And harder still, this shared time is limited to begin with. It is not only shared, but limited too.

As if I stand before a small balance, and on top of that I don't spend it alone. This is what made me reconsider the whole day. The day I used to see as a wide space where I place whatever I wish, wasn't so in reality.

It has a clear limit, one that cannot stretch.

Only twenty-four hours.

Given to me every morning, and given to Elon Musk, and to Jeff Bezos, and to the bread seller near our house, in exactly the same measure. None of us begins his day with twenty-five hours or more. No one gets an extra hour because he has a great dream, or an important project, or a sincere intention to change.

Here I began to understand why the time seemed tight.

Then I moved to energy and attention, and discovered that what applies to time, applies to them too.

My energy is not mine alone.

My attention is not mine alone.

My focus is not mine alone.

The family doesn't ask for my time only, it asks for my presence. And work doesn't take hours from my day only, it takes from my energy, my mood, and my ability to focus.

Then there are friends, messages, the news, social media, advertisements…

Everything, however small it seems, asks for a glance, and every glance, however simple it seems, takes something from the plate.

Here the idea became clearer.

Everyone reaches out daily to eat from my plate.

And then I understood the root of all those problems.

That I had thought it was mine alone.

The Journey's Question

Take a small sheet of paper, and write at the top: what are the things that reach out daily to my plate?

Then divide the paper into three simple columns: my time, my energy, my attention.

Try to fill each column with what suits it, without exaggeration and without justification.

Then look at the paper calmly, and ask yourself: was I treating these resources as though they were mine alone?

Remember: this is not my journey alone… it is ours.