Whether you believe that time is money or time is the 4th dimension, you’d probably agree that there isn’t enough of it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the holiday season is characterized by there being about 10 times less time than there is in our “normal” frenzied time-scarce lives. No wonder people get testy this time of year.

Tick, tick, tick...86,400 times every day. It's a wonder these things last for years. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Chances are you’ve heard about the fictitious bank account in which 86,400 seconds are deposited every day, every 24 hours. If you don’t use those seconds they are swept out of the account at midnight. At the very next moment a new batch of seconds appear, like cookies at the cookie store. This goes on until one day the bank closes and you are dead. No more time, no more cookies.

The fictitious bank analogy makes a good point that if you don’t use it you lose it, and that applies not only to the fictitious bank but to sex and to everything else in our lives.

In this illusion that we call reality, the hard, cold fact is we use up the seconds of our lives one way or another. Nobody spends them but us. We are responsible for what we make of our time or what we don’t make.

My Dad used to say “The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent in fishing.” He loved to fish and whether that Babylonian proverb is right or not, the seconds, minutes, and hours that Dad spent fishing certainly did enrich his life. I’m sure he didn’t even know his motto came from Babylon, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had. Shucks, I didn’t know it was a Babylonian proverb until I Googled it 10 minutes ago.

For my money (or my time), the Babylonians could just as well have replaced the word fishing with “meditation.” Or with any other word that would connote time well-spent.

Spending time well would be a lot easier if we weren’t living in the Age of Information, or the Age of Distractions. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. I believe the amount of time we have is inversely proportional to the number of distractions in our lives.

According to the Babylonians, if these guys went fishing all the time they would live forever. How many seconds would that be? Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

To make matters more complicated, a lot of the information we get is helpful and we’re not sorry to have it.

And then there’s the nasty habit that time has of speeding up or slowing down. Speeding up when the party is going well, slowing down when the root canal isn’t. One thing for sure is that the older you get the faster the time goes by. If it was up to me, I would have made it the exact opposite. But it’s not up to me. It’s not up to any one of us.

Although we can’t change the way time operates, one thing we can change is the Babylonian proverb, thus: The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent in ________________.

You fill in the blank. It’s my gift to you. Even during the frenetic holiday season may you find peace and joy in doing what makes you feel good.