We've Only Got a Hundred Years to Live

Contentment makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.
--Benjamin Franklin

Time is more important than money. The richest man in the world only has 24 hours in a day. The poorest has the same. You can make more money. With a few good choices and a little determination you can double your income but you can't add a minute to the day. Of course we can make changes that allow us to live longer. But the trouble with living longer is that those extra years come at the end, when we're old.

Even so, time IS more important than money. Money is a wonderful thing, certainly. It is opportunity and choices. It is the engine of security and pleasure. It can mean freedom from worry. It can give us mobility and status. Sadly, in our culture more people are enslaved by money and money worries than empowered or liberated. We are a want culture. People are preoccupied by what they don't have, and anxious over the possiblity of losing what they do have. Madison Avenue works hard to create and heighten this anxiety. It sells a lot of products.

If we can find the courage to let go of all our dangerous and destructive preoccupations what stretches out before us is a fabulous abundance of time. We can slow it down by the simple act of appreciation. Our lives are full of unloved moments and unappreciated beauty. We have a wealth of unnoticed blessings, a treasure of untapped potential, a mother lode of talent, opportunity and hope within us.

Mitch Albom wrote a wonderful book, For One More Day, about a man who is given his life back. Every morning, we are given our lives back. We can do good or ill. We can connect and heal wounds. We can grow and develop our strengths, explore our purpose and our dreams. Or we can waste the time altogether. We can crawl into a bottle, or merely continue the same old habits that keep us stuck and bored and uninspired. The time passes either way.

One of these mornings soon I ought to begin to live more intentionally. What if I began the day prayerfully, reflectively, earnestly? What if did something other than fire up the computer and play low stakes poker and drown my synapses in a warm bath of distraction? Tom Robbins once said, "We are put on this earth to enlarge the soul and light up the brain." Most days, I don't do anything like that. Most days, I'm just wasting time. Like Andy Dufresne says in the Shawshank Redemption, we have to make a choice: "Get busy living or get busy dying." We ought to give some thought to this choice, but most of us are too busy.