Mark Laabs :: The Blog Social enterprise, travel, and a bit of politics

The Power of Scarce Time

Yesterday afternoon, I was tired.  Very tired.  It was the kind of bone-weariness that comes when you have a straight week of late nights for work but where the morning still come just as early.  Yeah, that’s right, tired.

As a result, I was a hair’s width of backing out of my evening’s plans and trying to get some rest.  What a loss it would have been!  In the course of last evening, I enjoyed dinner at the coolest apartment I have seen in all of Shanghai, got to know a pretty interesting MD from a innovation and design firm called Continuum along with getting to know a fellow environmental entrepreneur better, enjoyed drinks and live music and a nice club called Anaar, met a Deloitte consultant who has done a lot of Prop 8 work in California (with common friends of mine!), made it out to another club where a solid Israeli DJ was spinning, and closed out the night at a late night place called Mao that I had often heard about but never visited.  In short, it was an epic night!

Why, though, was it post-worthy here?…because of the thing that got me out of bed to begin with – the sense that I didn’t have time to waste.  As with London a year before, I unexpectedly found myself essentially exiled from Shanghai for the end of 2009 to be at home with my father.  Then, I returned to Shanghai with the turn of the new year realizing that I was scheduled to have less than a year more in one of the most dynamic cities in the world.  Where had my endless time gone?

The result, then and now, has been a recommitment to, as Thoreau would put it, suck all the marrow out of life.  I’ve been better at connecting with old friends.  I’ve been discovering new ones.  I’ve begun living in Shanghai, not just working here.  In some ways, it is a strain.  Taking advantage of social opportunities comes at the cost of sleep and more recuperative relaxation, but when my grandkids want to know what it was like to live in China when it was a debutant to the world stage, at least now I will have some stories to tell!