Imagine when you were born, a divine being placed a secret amount of money into an account. Every day, you are given a disbursement from this account. Spend all the money given to you that day or lose it forever.
As life continues, the available money may fluctuate. For some, usable money each day begins to diminish, until one day, expectedly, no money is left. Others may lose their money suddenly and unexpectedly.
Once the money’s gone, it’s over. You never know exactly when the money will run out. But it will without fail.
All we can do is spend the money we have in the best way we know how. We can spend our money on the people we love, doing what matters most. Or we can spend our money on the pursuit of things that only add more burdens to our money.
What if we replaced all instances of the word ‘money‘, with ‘time‘?
Most of us trade hours of our lives for money, which we use to pay for our homes, our things and lifestyles. Instead of reading prices in dollars, we could translate those price tags to hours of our lives that we are selling to buy that thing. Would we make the same kinds of decisions about how we spend our money, if it was actually how we were spending our time?
Money can be made, lost, and made again but we’ll never get more than 24 hours per day. All we can do is choose how we spend those 24 hours while we have them. We never know when we’ll get sick, injured, or lose some of our capabilities. We must do our best to appreciate what we have and treat our time as a precious limited resource.
Start the thing that you’ve wanted to do some day. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago – the second best time, is now.
Let’s plant some trees.