Managing the Minutes and Seconds of Your Life

Many people, myself included, search endlessly through life for the ‘magic’ elixir of wisdom that might prove beneficial by providing growth to a new level of maturity of character.

Is it perhaps a real skill in life to know how to wisely make best use of each portion of time, the minutes and even the seconds? I think so.

Think of the fragmenting that occurs on the hard disk of a personal computer over time. When we ‘de-frag’ the computer we see a graphical image of the disk’s profile on the monitor before us; it’s all the fragments of the disk that have been wedged in there through deleted files and file corruptions mainly. When we de-frag we’re simply compressing all that usable disk memory into a smaller space, to make more space available on the disk for future use, hence a more efficient computer.

Now, our time is not that different to that fragmented disk but the fragments are recorded and imprinted in real time, and we don’t get to see it graphically. We do waste many fragments of time (minutes, hours, seconds) through our days. We could probably argue in different ways that in some seasons of life we waste days, weeks, even years.

The fragments of time that we waste we never get over again. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. The Bible talks about making the most of every opportunity.[1] It talks about ‘redeeming the time’ as if time could be bought with tokens. It implies that we would plan our lives so well and considerably, for each moment, that we’d foresee wasted time and passionately ensure it was covered--staying awake and not falling asleep to opportunities in life.

This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have down time and time to play and rest. On the contrary, we’d have the best and most rejuvenating rest and play time.

Ghandi once said, “Learn as if you would live forever, live as if you would die tomorrow.” Perhaps that’s the crux here. To commit to lifelong voraciousness of learning and to live so smartly to pretend today was our last, directs a life, doesn’t it?

Managing our minutes and seconds--the purpose of a disciplined, ordered, wise life--is a good way to extract what we were meant to extract from it. It’s there for us; all we need to do is take it... one moment at a time.

Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

[1] See, for example, Ephesians 5:15-20.