Don't be Time's Fool

Doing things in small chunks deprives us of the ability to see the complete truth. It conceals time’s bigger picture and this can be a hazardous thing for 2 reasons.

The first reason is wastage - If you have an inclination toward a perceived negative facet of life, say depression for example, then I’m afraid you may never realize how much time is worn out and wasted across your lifetime on feeling depressed.

Say you had your very own “life accountant” (in the form of a little imaginary man in a white suit and top hat) and he tallied up every moment for which you felt depressed, you may be surprised at the results he hands you. Perhaps you’ll find that you spent up to 6 months being depressed non-stop for every moment of every day and every night. And whilst your first reflection may be “what a waste of 6 whole months” you’ll be helpless in regaining any of those moments.

You need to realize that time is being exhausted on something worthless before you’ve completed exhausting it. This isn’t easy to do. At the outset, your emotions will thwart you. But if you succeed, then the quality of your life will improve wholly. And when your life accountant hands you the final tally, the negative fragments will be eclipsed by all the goodness of your life to the point where you may not even be able to pick them out.

The second reason is presumption – When it comes to the good stuff, people presume that time is limitless and take the simple things for granted. This is mostly enabled by our notorious (but VERY necessary) talent for forgetting that we must perish.

As Paul Bowles eloquently described it:

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens 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? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."