Welcome to The PATH — A weekly reflection with three timeless insights for daily life. This week’s reflection explores how to guard our spare moments in life. Specifically, this post discusses: Moments, Patience, and Being Time.
1. Moments
How is your relationship with time? It might sound like a strange question, but it's essential. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson advised, “Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them, and their value will never be known. Improve them, and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”
Do you have any spare moments to guard? If so, what are the obstacles to protecting these precious moments?
A recent episode of the Perennial Meditations podcast discussed Seneca’s letter On Saving Time. Seneca wrote,
“Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which until lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.”
We are wrong when we look forward to death; a significant portion of death has already passed. The years of our lives behind us are in death’s hands, stressed Seneca. Our time is the one thing that is really ours, and it is never too early to start guarding it.
2. Patience
Aristotle said, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Do you know anyone that embodies patience? Emerson suggested that we should all “adopt the pace of nature — her secret is patience.”
The scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin observed,
“We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.”
A previous guest on In Search of Wisdom, Oliver Burkeman (author of Four Thousand Weeks), dedicates an entire chapter to patience. Burkeman writes, “It’s fair to say that patience has a terrible reputation. The prospect of doing anything that requires patience simply seems unappetizing.” Patience begins with the willingness to stop and be where you are — to engage with that part of the journey instead of badgering reality to hurry up.
Perhaps the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu explained it best, “Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.”
3. Being Time
Guarding our spare moments and having the patience to let life unfold have much to do with our relationship to time. According to Dogen, a thirteenth-century Zen Master, “Beings, things, and events do not exist in time: being, things, and events are times.”
The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal stressed,
“So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; … we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists.”
Several philosophers and spiritual thinkers have suggested we see ourselves as being time (or inextricably linked). The Buddha put it this way, “Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.”
In the excellent new book The Art of Self Improvement, author Anna Katharina Schaffner explains that mindfulness is about relearning how to live in the here and now. It encourages us to direct our attention fully and nonjudgmentally to whatever task we are currently performing.
Likewise, in his Collected Poems, Emerson advised, “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich, who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. With its hopes and invitations, this new day is too dear to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful. If you read something that might help someone else — please share it.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
JW
P.S. Feel free to comment or ask any questions!