I have always found it ironic that so many
people say they would do anything for a little more time every day and yet they
squander the time they already have. Time is life’s great leveler. We all have
the same allotment of twenty-four hours in a day. What separates the people who
create great lives from the also-rans is how they use these hours.
Most of us live as if we have an infinite
amount of time to do all the things we know we must do to live a full and
rewarding life. And so we procrastinate and put the achievement of our dreams
on hold while we tend to those daily emergencies that fill up our days. This is
a certain recipe for a life of regret. As novelist Paul Bowles once wrote:
…because we don’t know [when we will die], we
get to think of life as inexhaustible well. Yet everything occurs for only a
certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times
will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s
so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life
without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many
more times will you watch the full moon rise? And yet it all seems limitless.
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