SECOND WISE, YEAR FOOLISH

June 22nd, 2019

We’ve all heard the phrase Penny wise, pound Foolish.  We make a decision regarding a small sum of money that is wise, while wasting large sums…  Perhaps we can think of someone who spends time cutting out coupons but then squanders hundreds of dollars while at the bar with friends.

There’s an even more important distinction to be made here, and it’s often one missed in the pursuit of aims.

That distinction is time.  We can flip the actions of this wise fool on it’s head and ask: what’s a better use of time?  Sitting around cutting coupons, or spending time with friends?  Perhaps the monetary cost seems justified in this frame, or perhaps not.

Money aside, we can investigate this use of time with even more scrutiny.

How exactly are we spending our seconds and our years?

Are they passing us by unnoticed?  Or are we wasting years waiting for the occasional second when it feels like the movements of life take our breath away?

So many sleep walk through time bouncing from one distraction to the next, waiting for some monotony to end, chasing some pleasure, and all of this might seem justified for the rare second when life feels alive, but all the time between these few and far between moments add up to the majority of our lives. 

We waste years for seconds when we think things are finally good.

This is inevitably a waste of years, and subsequently a waste of most seconds that make up such years.

When it comes to our most valuable resource.  Our non-renewable time, how we spend it is our greatest and most important decision in any given moment.

We do ourselves the greatest service by seeking to be a master of how to spend a single second.

If in any given moment, no matter the circumstance, we can call upon a full and mindful presence of our attention, then fewer seconds and fewer years will be lost.

So many of us are waiting for something amazing to grab our full attention.

We need only learn how to give our full attention in order to experience how amazing any given moment can be.