Chapter 5
What Understanding the Value of Time Can Do for Your Life
Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.
—Sir Francis Bacon
Looking at a calendar has always made me feel more inspired than I do when just thinking about the day ahead of me. I see the dates listed and the number of blocks drawn for the week or the month for what they represent: a finite period of time with a definite beginning and end. This visual makes me realize that once I reach the last date, I will turn the page over—and never return. Whatever I have used those dates for, whatever I have experienced during that time, is, for better or worse, gone forever—and with it, the opportunities it held. And thinking about it this way compels me to make it worthwhile.
Perhaps it's becoming more apparent to me as I get older that my life is a compilation of these pages. They represent everything I did, saw, felt, accomplished, affected, influenced, thought, learned, and succeeded and failed at during that time. Every interaction with friends, family, acquaintances, clients, neighbors, and strangers that took place during that time period is now a part of my relationships with those people, for better or worse. It makes me want to approach every one of those encounters with care, to treat them as if the memory of them will last forever and cannot be changed—because it can't.
That's the thing about time. ...
