The Value of Time Keeps Inflating

You think the value of gold is going through the roof? Well, also inflating like crazy are the value of leather, silver, diamonds and almost everything else that’s considered luxurious or rare. For me, it’s the value of time. It gets more and more precious as it goes by.

Mankind has made some feeble attempts to understand time. But Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, didn’t attempt to understand it. He just attempted to use it well. He came up with a way to divide your time into parts and make use of each part thereby becoming one of “the highly effective” people he so admired. I love his choice of words. Not successful people, not lovable people, not admirable people, not compassionate people but “effective” people. We all want to be effective or do we?

I’m not sure I want to make maximum use of every minute I’m given. When I’m busy, time goes by at break-neck speed. I like to slow down and be aware of its passage. Please, God, just let me enjoy it. I love it so.

Stephen Covey, as much as he thought about and valued time, ran out of it recently as we all will. We can divide it, we can analyze it, we can parse it, we can regret it, but we can’t stop it. It goes and soon, we go with it.

Another Stephen, Stephen Hawking, used his enormous IQ to try to figure out time. He wrote about it in A Brief History of Time, which I read some time ago and pretended to understand. I think he basically said that time is a boundable thing that had a definite beginning and will have a definite end. Do you buy that? Because I don’t. My IQ is probably half of Stephen Hawking’s but that doesn’t make sense to me. If space is infinite, and I’m sure it is, then time is infinite. The Big Bang happened an infinite number of times and will go on happening. There’s our time and there’s God’s time.

Here’s what I know about time. On a summer evening, I can sit out on my patio and watch the thunderclouds building in the distance. The setting sun turns the tops of them a stunning peach color and makes the sky look aqua by contrast. I can sip my ice tea and watch the deer foraging for food in the meadow and hear the pigeons cooing in a nearby tree. That’s not one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s just a good way to spend time.

I guess you can know more about time by just spending it.