“People are
frugal in guarding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to
squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right
to be stingy.”
One in 400 trillion. Those are the odds of you being born.[i]
You won the biggest lottery of all time
the day you were born, but no one told you. Then consider that many cosmologists
contend that there is no evidence for other intelligent life in the universe. You
won not only the greatest lottery on earth, but in the entire universe. So what
have you been doing with the winnings-the time
of your life? Have you been squandering
it like so many state lottery winners?
Abraham Lincoln reportedly said “a lawyer’s stock in trade is [her]
time.” He could have said that about everyone, not just lawyers. All we
ultimately have in this life is our time, and how we choose to spend it. In the
end it might seem that our lives were all too short, but as the Roman
philosopher Seneca wrote 2000 years ago:
“It
is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life
is long enough, and a sufficiently amount has been given to us for the highest achievements
if it were all invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on
no good activity [binge watching Netflix?],
we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed
away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but
we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…Life is long
if you know how to use it.” [ii]
It
is our life so we have the moral
obligation to decide how to spend the
time of our life. Unfortunately, too many of us rarely if ever reflect on
how we should spend it. Instead, the lottery winnings are mindlessly frittered
away day after day, week after week, year after year.[iii] We
unwittingly treat each passing moment the same, as if they are all of equal
value, but they’re not. Each day, week, month and year we spend makes the next, of necessity, more valuable, because our life
and the projects we fill them with, are finite.[iv]
Yet we tend not to treat them that way. We live habitually, not mindfully.
In his thought provoking book, This
Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, Martin Hagglund places our life
choices in terms of what it means to be a free human being:
“….we
are free because we are able to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our
time. All forms of freedom-e.g. the freedom to act, the freedom to speak, the
freedom to love-are intelligible as freedom only insofar as we are free to
engage the question of what we should do with our time.”[v]
To live freely requires that we
confront the moral challenge of choosing how to spend the time of our finite
lives. If you do not feel free, perhaps
it is due in part to not reflecting on this profound question. Consider that the
one thing that truly “belongs to each of us is not property or goods, but the time of our life.”[vi]
Certainly, reflecting on this is worth some of your time?
[i] https://www.theepochtimes.com/scientists-calculate-the-probability-of-your-existence_787114.html
[ii]
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
[iii]
To get a vivid look at the calendar of your life see Tim Urban’s startling look
at the brevity of your time: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
[iv] Martin
Hagglund, This Life: Secular Life and
Spiritual Freedom (2019)
[v]
Id. at 23.
[vi]
Id.
Painting, Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory
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