And then one day you find - ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run; you missed the starting gun!” - Pink Floyd, Time
At the end of last month, I wrote in
If we’re lucky, we have no idea how long we have on this earth. It’s only the very aged and terminally ill who are unfortunate enough to have such information. As children, we assume we’ll live forever, and even high school seems a million years away! Eventually we start remarking to one another how time really seems to fly by, and then it’s “Oh my goodness Dorothy, can you believe another school year is over, and our children will be freshmen in the fall… Glory be!” You’re chuckling – you know what I’m talking about!
Our time bank is a finite account, whose balance we don’t know, that is declining minute by minute, and that does not accept deposits. Sure, you can affect the balance by living a healthy life, driving carefully, and avoiding high risk situations. However once today’s gone, it’s gone. We need to be careful that we don’t procrastinate on the things we really want to do while we have our youth and our health, until it’s possibly too late to do them at all.
I hear a lot of people say, “I’d love to do XYZ, but I just don’t have the time!” Well, last I checked, every one of us has the same 24 hours of every day as the guy next door. It’s a function of how you *choose* to spend those hours. Let’s assume that we all get 8 hours of good sleep every night (yeah, right, but work with me here!), and we spend 10 hours commuting, working, and on lunch break during the work week. That leaves you 62 waking, well rested, non-work hours for you to spend. Certainly some of those hours will be spent bathing and eating – I do encourage both. You’ll probably need a few hours for obligations like paying bills and straightening up the house. However after that, take a hard look at how you spend your time. Track the number of hours you spend in front of the TV, computer, or video games. Do you go to extremes to keep your house spotless or your yard HGTV-worthy? Do you read or talk on the phone a lot? There’s nothing at all wrong with any of these activities – as long as they are *MORE* important to you than your bigger life goals. Remember – you have to fit your Big Rocks in before the pebbles, sand, and water, or the big rocks will never happen.
Action Challenge: Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? Do you have goals for yourself and for your life? It’s OK if you don’t yet know what your master plan is going to be, but surely there’s something you want to achieve, at least in the short term. Do you make progress toward these goals every day in ways large or small? If not, what are you waiting for? We’ll talk more about goal setting later, but today focus on making the best use of your precious time. Take a positive step toward that goal TODAY, whether it be researching how to do it online, talking to someone who’s already doing it, or if you already know what you have to do – do it! If you don’t get started today/this week/this month/this year, then you’ll finish a day/week/month/year later, if you ever get around to it at all. Let’s go - time’s a wasting!
Cheers and all my best to you!
~Brooxi
"Sitting on the dock of the bay watching the tide roll away. I'm just sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time "
-Otis Redding, Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
© Stephanie Brooks 2008
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