How to Be Wise: Time is like money, be careful where you invest it.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. – Annie Dillard

Time is like currency.  It’s a precious commodity in limited supply. So we need to be careful how we spend it.

The meter is running. How will you spend your time?

With money we try to be smart consumers.  We work hard to earn it and we know that when we cash our paycheck, we have only so much to spend.  We choose to give our precious earnings to businesses whose products we like.  We can choose to give our money to businesses who are doing good in the world.  Spending our money is more that a simple exchange of cash for goods.  If we spend wisely, we are investing in the future.  We want our money to go out there and do good in the world.  Naturally we can do the opposite: we can throw away our money on things that don’t matter.  Things that just create more clutter in our homes.  Things that eat up space and make it impossible to find the precious objects in your home that really matter.  You can do business with hucksters and charlatans, who will take you money and make waste of it.

Our time is the same.  We don’t have endless amounts of it.  All those precious minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years add up quickly. So we need to have an  awareness of what we are spending it on.

Each moment you spend being patient, being kind, being thoughtful, being grateful, and being generous is a wise investment.  You are “doing business” with emotions that are making the world a better place. The time you give to these emotions enhances your life and the lives of others.  And in the end, these are emotions that pay off fantastic dividends. Investing in these emotions creates emotional wealth.  And you go on to create wealth for generations that will follow.

And just as with money, we can squander our time on emotions that are destructive: bitterness, self-righteousness, guilt, worry.  Minute by minute, we are losing our lives to emotions that suck up our energy but are incapable of giving anything back.

You have just twenty-four hours in a day.  Perhaps eighteen of those are waking hours.  That’s 1080 minutes.  64800 seconds.

The clock is ticking.  The meter is running.  On what will you spend your time?