TIME IS LIFE

Sands of Time, Jamestown, NC

I entered the full time working world as a graduate Industrial Engineer. One of the primary objectives of this career is to optimize the cost of a product or process. That usually involves optimizing the time that it takes to produce a given deliverable. This is a discipline whose mantra states that “time is money”. Living a working life around this mantra was in opposite conflict with the need to balance my time with other priorities. In fact, I worked for a Vice President at one point that called all of us young managers into his office and noted that we all seemed to be spending too much time on the golf course. He put us on notice that if he ever heard any of us had a single digit handicap, we’d be fired. He said that somewhat jokingly, but we got the message that he expected us to be spending an inordinate amount of our waking time on the job.

The opposite point of view is adhering to a mantra that “time is life”. And "time is love". To live a balanced life, we need to be conscious of the time we clock on our job life, our family life, and our spiritual life to have a full and satisfying life. It’s important to take inventory of where we spend our time—for where we spend our time is where our heart resides.

Spiritual time includes time to be still. Time to listen to the sounds of life all around us; the sound of wind gently moving through the trees, the sound of waves rhythmically breaking onto a sandy beach, the sound of a baby’s cooing in his mother’s arms, the sound of a wren singing in the first light of day, the sound of melted snow in a mountain stream rushing over smooth stones in the spring, the summer sound of a loon’s melancholy song across a northern lake at dusk, the sound of rain drops slowly falling on a metal roof in the fall, and the lonesome sound of a train whistle on a winter’s night.

We need to pause life occasionally and shake ourselves awake to the reality of time and its precious availability to us all so that we can live it to the fullest. Each of us is born with a variable number of grains of sand in our hourglass. And the hourglass is always in motion until the last grain is spent.