On Wasting a Lifetime - Sunday, February 03, 1980

On Wasting a Lifetime – Sunday, February 03, 1980

Is there really, somewhere, in a meadow far away, still a shepherdess who sings all day while she watches her flocks? If there is, we are separated from her by a thousand cares, our world caught up in crisis, strung with personal tensions and responsibilities that tie us up and bind our songs within our hearts. For too many of us the world is bleak and gray and cold, and we are breathless with hurry as we rush from one job to another. No time for meadows or easy songs.

Before we know it ten days have passed and then a hundred and we have not done anything that matters. We have not once touched the world and it has not touched us. Who is it that winds us up and makes us run and keeps us from the soul of things?

A century ago Henry Thoreau observed, “If a man walks in the woods for love of them, half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed as an industrious and enterprising citizen.”¹

So it is. To fit somebody else’s idea of significance, we mold our days, our senses becoming ever so gradually deadened. We watch life dribble away, leak out and be gone. But now, before it is gone—now is the time to ask those crucial questions, “Am I living without regrets? If I had today to do over again would there be any changes?”

One writer said this, “If I had it to do again, I’d remember that childhood is short, only a blink long, and I’d leave the cobwebs in the corners to go play with someone small I loved.

“If I had it to do again, I’d remember that my personal allotment of sunsets is numbered, and I’d often take time to watch one before they were all gone. If I had it to do again, I’d care less that the house was perfect and more that my relationships were.”

“… I’d buy a morning off with a dear one instead of a new couch.”
“…I’d sleep when I was tired, hold my tongue when I had an eloquent, angry speech and pray like I meant it . . . If I had it to do again.”²

But none of us ever have it to do again, so we must do today the things we would. We must make our life by what we love. To choose anything else is, in the end, to have chosen nothing at all.

¹ The Readers’ Digest, February, 1976, pg. 63.
² Maurine J. Ward, January 26,1980. unpublished.