Far too many of us live life as if it were going to go on forever.  We put off things until tomorrow when we can never be sure there will be a tomorrow.  Suppose we knew we had only one more year to live.  How would we spend that year?  Would we continue to live very much the way we are now living?  If we can answer yes to this question, then we are probably doing a pretty good job of living our lives already.  But, if we would behave very differently during the next year, if we knew we had only one more year to live, then we are probably traveling the wrong road. 

When we are young, time seems to pass so slowly that "the rest of our life" seems almost like an eternity.  We feel that we have so much time left that we can afford to squander it. But, as we grow older, the pace of life seems to accelerate at an ever-increasing speed so that we become increasingly aware of our own mortality.  As we move into our senior years, some of us begin to panic.  We have so much yet to do and so little time in which to do it.  We begin to see the importance of each and every single day and try to get as much out of each day as possible.

Isn't it a shame that we can't take a more mature attitude toward life while we are still young?  Wouldn't it be so much better if we could all understand the limited nature of life in our youth, and start trying to make the most of each day and year early in our life? Some people have done exactly that.  And such people have accomplished so much during their lifetimes that we often wonder how they ever found enough time.  They simply saw time as a precious gift that should never be squandered no matter how long we think we are going to live.

Some of us believe that our purpose on earth involves doing more than just trying to accomplish the things we want to accomplish for ourselves.  We believe we have a duty to try to make life better for those around us and to try to make the world a better place for future generations.  Those who share these views realize that we should never squander time.  Any time we have, in excess of the time we need for ourselves, should be spent trying to make this a better world. If we all shared this view, and behaved accordingly, wouldn't this be a very different world? 

Copyright 2014 Allen W. Smith

TB-115—Posted 07/06/2014

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