Over the weekend, I made a quick trip up to Sparta to meet my 6-week-old nephew. I wanted to be able to see him while he was still a baby, plus it’s been a while since I’d seen my niece, sister, brother-in-law, and my parents. But, I had a limited amount of time that worked in my schedule. I had a day to visit since I had some other things I needed to do in Milwaukee.
I could have pushed the trip off and waited until I had more time. I spoke with someone about a job on Friday, sent some samples of my work and said she’d be in touch with me early the next week. If I had made my plans based on the fact that I could miss a call from her I would’t have made the trip. She didn’t call while I was gone and I would have wasted the opportunity to visit with my family.
How much of life do we put off in anticipation of something else happening? I’m starting to learn that it’s better to just do what’s important at the moment and adjust to anything that comes up later.
A great example of this is when my wife and I took a trip to Paris and London. We had an hour before we had to board our train to Paris. I thought about just hanging out, but the British Library was a few blocks down the street. There were some hand-written lyrics from the Beatles I wanted to see, so I thought I’d give it a go.
The first thing I saw when I entered the room were pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook. I saw Lewis Carroll’s diary that had the beginnings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, scores by Mozart and Handel in their own hand, the Gutenberg Bible, oh, yeah, and this little thing called the Magna Carta! Not to mention that Beatles’ lyrics. The amount of history I took in, in just an hour was amazing. If I had thought that I can’t possibly do anything in an hour I would have missed that entire experience.
We need to put as much life as we can into life. We can’t wait for the perfect time or more time. We each have 24 hours a day to work with. Our days are limited. We need to use them wisely.
Start with whatever amount of time you can. If you want to write a book – write an hour a day. If you want to lose weight – workout for a 30 minutes a day. If you want to catch up with a friend – make a phone call and chat for 15 minutes. No amount of time is ever wasted. You don’t need a month’s worth of time in order to do something. Do it today. Do it now. Spend the next five minutes writing down what you’ve put off for too long. And then spend an hour doing it!
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