Thief of Time

I am District Secretary of the Midland Unitarian Association, and we had a meeting on Saturday, which was very good, and very rich, but generated a lot of minutes. And my job for today is to type those up, and to disseminate them, and to generate a to-do list from them.

And I've been putting it off. Some of the things I've been doing this morning were quite legitimate - going for a run, checking & dealing with e-mails, but I've spent an inordinate amount of time on Face book, and have even found myself cleaning the kitchen, just to avoid starting those minutes.

*sigh*

But at least when I became aware of what I was doing, it gave me the idea for this blogpost. One of my favourite quotes about time-wasting is "procrastination is the thief of time", so I went onto Google to find out who said / wrote it, and it was Edward Young.

However, on the website I looked it up on, there were a couple of other really splendid quotes about procrastination, one on the side of judgement, one on the side of mercy. The one by Pablo Picasso really frightened me:

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

 

Well, gosh, OK. I'll get on with them, I promise. Just as soon as I've finished this blogpost.

 

The other, by Denis Waitley, who is an American motivational speaker and writer, I found much more forgiving and soothing:

 

"Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow."

 

"You still have an entire tomorrow." Isn't that amazing?  And isn't it hopeful? Whatever we have done in the past, each new day is full of new possibilities and new hope. So I give thanks to God, who has given us Time in which to move and live and hope and dream.