Shreds & Patches of Time

You’ve heard all the old expressions before. Time is on your side, playing with time, one day at a time, out of time, lost track of time, or time and tide wait for no man. Human beings are obsessed with time. They want to use it to advantage, save it, waste it; some even have the desire to travel back in it.

What you hear most often however, is the lament that we don’t have enough of it, and should learn to manage it better. It goes without saying that time is one of our most precious resources. Lost time can never be regained. Horace Mann said it best. “Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.”

Time management is a popular business buzz phrase these days. Everyone seems to carry around some tool to help them manage their time more profitably. They all seem to have a Day Runner, or for the technologically more advanced of us, it would be the Blackberry. All in a futile effort to control the time allotted to us each day.

In this age of super productivity, everyone thinks they must get the most out of every minute, in every situation. As people fly from one obligation to another, that’s the catchphrase you hear most often. “I just don’t have enough time to accomplish everything I want to do.” “There aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.” Where does the time go? H. Jackson Brown, Jr. told us to never say we don’t have enough time; that we have exactly the same number of hours each day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.