As a graduate Industrial
Engineer, I consumed most of my early career optimizing the time and cost of a
product or process. This is a discipline
whose mantra states that “time is money”. Consuming a working life around this
mantra was in opposite conflict with the need to balance my time with other
priorities.
I’ve since learned that 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/relational life, and our spiritual life in
order 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.
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.
The Texas golfer, Scottie
Scheffler, just won The Open Championship in Ireland, but his pregame presser
caught not only my attention but much of the world. In short, he stated that “This is not a
fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from
the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the
deepest places of your heart.” I’ve
previously written that not every available job provides both a good income and
ideal life satisfaction, but it can provide the money to acquire meaning in the
other two areas if we look for the life balance.
He noted that golf doesn’t
define him as a person and that if it interferes too much with his family life
it will be “the last day that I play out here for a living.” That’s also good
advice for someone planning to retire soon. I’ve often noted that finding
satisfaction in things of this life lasts about as long as it takes to remove
the price tags and then we move on to the next thing. His reply on winning the Open was “It’s going
to be an awesome two minutes. Then we're
going to get to the next week.”
Scheffler summarized his
state of mind before the final round of golf’s prime major as “I’ve been called
to come out here, do my best to compete, and glorify God. That’s pretty much it.” That all shows me that he’s doing a good job
of “keeping life in balance”.
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