Time is of the essence

How many times have we heard "Time is of the essence"?  How meaningless those words sounded when we were young and the Hill of Time loomed ahead!  We had all the time in the world, we thought, plenty to fritter away a year or two....

After we reached the top of the Hill of Time and beyond, those words began to make sense. Time on the planet being finite, how do we spend our "wild and precious" minutes and hours?

When struggling with a decision  that involves the spending of a week or a month or even a day, I always ask myself this question, the last two lines in Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day."



The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?