Improving My Time

The trip back to Tagbilaran after conducting a paralegal training in the Municipality of Tubigon several years back seemed very slow. I was in a hurry because I still had to go home to Dimiao and knew that I still had many things to do when I get home.

On the way, I saw some bystanders having a drinking spree. I also saw people sitting outside their homes having lively chit-chats with neighbors and friends. Then I commented to myself: "O, if could only get some of their time and add it to mine!" But then I realized that such was a futile comment. Each of us were given our own times and length of years to manage. I have to manage my time well and other peoples should be responsible with their own too.

Now, half of my earthly life had been spent. I’m still afraid to look back lest I see that these thirty years were also wasted. But if given thirty, forty or some years more, how do I manage it? The book Miscellaneous Writings by Mary Baker Eddy gave me a good answer. Here I am reprinting it in full. I hope you will learn from it too.

IMPROVE YOUR TIME

Excerpted from Miscellaneous Writings

by Mary Baker Eddy, page 230

Success in life depends upon persistent effort, upon the improvement of moments more than upon any other one thing. A great amount of time is consumed in talking nothing, doing nothing, and indecision as to what one should do. If one would be successful in the future, let him make the most of the present.

Three ways of wasting time, one of which is contemptible, are gossiping mischief, making lingering calls, and mere motion when at work, thinking of nothing or planning for some amusement, — travel of limb more than mind. Rushing around smartly is no proof of accomplishing much.

All successful individuals have become such by hard work; by improving moments before they pass into hours, and hours that other people may occupy in the pursuit of pleasure. They spend no time in sheer idleness, in talking when they have nothing to say, in building air-castles or floating off on the wings of sense: all of which drop human life into the ditch of nonsense, and worse than waste its years.

"Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait."