Time is the coin of your life

“Time is the coin of your life.  It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.  Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”  ~Carl Sandburg~

I tell this in some fashion to each of my students, or my friends,  when they say that they don’t have enough time to: review; study; work ahead; play; relax; exercise; pray; be with friends; cook; or anything else. You see, if you lay out your list of things to do, and start chipping away at it, it will get done. Granted, it takes practice. What I decided was to pick just ONE thing to work on. I decided to take time EVERY day to get my head on straight and pray. After spending time doing that, I moved on to planning healthy meals, and cleaning or decluttering one small area. I know, you probably have heard all of that many times.

When my son was in those infant and toddler years, I had a number of girlfriends in the area who had little ones as well. We would regularly lament that we were getting ‘nothing done’ all day. It was then that I realized that we were creating very incomplete things to do lists! You see, we were leaving this off the list: “rock the baby, hold the baby, change the baby, clean the baby, take the baby to the park, show the baby the sky, sing to the baby, feed the baby, soothe the baby, laugh with the baby, see the husband, hear the husband, make the meals, put the baby to bed, get the baby up, and more. I explained that to my friends, and we all felt a new sense of reality.

You see, our “lists” can be endless. If we procrastinate when we could do some of those things, we do feel lousy or guilty. But it will continue in perpetuity, unless we change! It doesn’t have to be a big change. It can be a series of daily or weekly incremental changes. Eventually that balance will shift.

As we decide how to spend the coin called time, we feel less a victim of the demands of the day. It is that feeling of powerlessness about our time that overwhelms us, isn’t it? Doing just a few things can make a difference in our approach.

I hope that you have some balance in your time-coins today. I hope that you are able to breathe deeply and stay in touch with YOUR heart. I hope you can reach out to someone who needs you today. Have a lovely day!