The year 2019 is nearly finished and has gone racing by!
Where does time go? As a child, I remember calculating how old I would be when the year 2000 happened and realizing that I would be nearly 50. As a teenager, I could hardly wait until that 18th birthday that would bring adulthood and college. In my twenties starting out in the business world, it seemed that I had nothing but time since money was at more of a premium. Each year brought new uses for how I would spend my time. I would nod my head when people in their sixties would say that their life had passed as if they had been looking out the window of a speeding car. I thought they were exaggerating. They weren’t.
The concept of time becomes more important to us as we grow older. It is something that is at a premium with each year lived. Every second that passes is lost. Many of us “sell” our time professionally.
An attorney bills in increments of hours, accounting for every minute at his office. A restaurant sells food but, if they have a slow night with lackluster sales, the restaurant will never sell those “empty” tables again. Each hour is unique even if spent on doing repetitive tasks. We will not again have the moments we used for playing that video game or washing the car.
If you choose to spend time going fishing instead of playing golf, then one of your hobbies will suffer and the other you should become better. Is that what happens in relationships? When it is said that two people grew apart, was it because they didn’t spend enough time with each other? Are you then a better parent if you devote more time to being with your children instead of at your job or business?
Now that I am on the downward slope of my business career, I am just a few short days away from not owning any business for the first time since I was a college student. How will I fill my day? I will still be doing a little work for the guy who now owns the business (my son), but a large time constraint is gone.
With the activities that fill the days for my wife and me, we are still on the go constantly every day. I keep saying when I retire, I will do this or that but, deep in my heart, I know I never will otherwise I would be doing it now. Time is the one thing that is finite for each of us. We will probably not know when our time is up, so to speak.
Is it a waste of time to spend so much of it in front of the television, on the golf course or taking that daily nap? If we are doing those things, it isn’t a waste of our time but a decision on how to spend the time. The time we can never recapture or ever use again. What we did with our time is how we are remembered.