Be Rich

Tick… There are an estimated 1,349,778,399 seconds remaining for me in this life. I don’t want to spend any of my life’s time in hate.

Imagine that you are standing in a quiet and peaceful room. Your hand is stretched out in front of you. Each second a pure glass marble falls out of the air and passes through your hand and as it does, it is transformed before falling to land at your feet where it is yours forever. The only sound is the clicking noise each marble makes as it falls to the pile with the rest. What do these marbles become? That is really up to us.

When I was in high school (and it has been a while), I remember that my home room teacher had a poster on the wall. It was a picture of a stream bubbling and flowing over smoothed rocks and around trees and plants. I believe the caption was the Henry David Thoreau quote “That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.” (How is it that I can remember that poster and yet have managed to forget most of my algebra?) What makes a person rich? I am talking about rich in a way that matters.

The marbles become beautiful jewels or ugly stones.

We are showered with the gift of this continuous choice. We carry the result of these choices with us for the rest of our lives. As the marble passes through our hand, if we are happy or at peace or feeling joy, the marble is transformed into a precious gem that we get to keep forever. If we are feeling hate, misery, unrest; we get a stone. Working 60 hour weeks to build up a huge pile of money doesn’t make you rich where it really counts if each marble that falls through your hand is turned into a bit of granite or tar. The point is again, that our lives are finite and so each marble is potentially precious beyond imagining.

Now, there are many things that we have no choice over. Sad things happen to all of us. We will all grow through these things and our life will be changed. I am talking about the things we do have a choice over. Hate, greed, anger and guilt are all things that ruin the potential beauty that this life has for each of us. If someone steals your car and you decide to hate them and every time you think about it, you feel the pain and hate you are letting yourself be hurt again. The pile of rocks grows; wasted time and life.

We all need to realize that if someone does something bad to us, they are the ones who are really hurt. What defines a person is what that person puts into the world. Sad and bad things happen, but they do not define us. We aren’t defined by anything that “happens” to us. If someone steals my car, it doesn’t make me a bad person. Why should I feel bad about it? Obviously, I will feel loss. Each time I go to get into my non-existent car, I will miss it. I am talking about the anger and hate. If I fall to this, I am re-living the loss of my car over and over. I am letting the thief steal even more from me.

We are defined simply by what we do; what we put into the world. We can feel good about ourselves if we are putting what we consider to be good into the world. At that point the stolen car becomes irrelevant. It wasn’t something we did. We can feel good knowing who we are and where our place is and what we are contributing. We can look for peace in ourselves and know that we are becoming wealthier in the only way that really matters.

Be rich.

The Amazing Gift

1,349,966,998

Tick... By some accounts, I have 1,349,966,998 more seconds left in this world (give or take). Of course, this is just a statistic based on a bunch of historical data and is probably about as accurate as predicting a sunny day next Tuesday and three years from now. That isn't really the point though. My time here is finite at least in my present form. I have been giving this more and more thought lately. My thinking isn't borne from some fear of my mortality. I am just becoming more aware of the Amazing Gift. My spark, my awareness, my ability to interact with the world around me; the fact that I am here is a beautiful and wondrous gift. I have been spending some of my time thinking about how I should use this gift.

Each second is precious. It could be the second that you see your first perfect circle rainbow (I saw one in a plane… it was cool.), the second you see a baby born or the second you cure cancer. It might be the second that you truly become aware and wake up to the world around you. It could be the second that you recapture your childhood wonder or save a life or taste the perfect cup of coffee. These perfect jewels of possibility called “seconds” are showered upon us to the point that we stop even noticing them and look further and further into the future toward a more perfect satisfaction. Unlike real jewels though, they are only collected if they are used. Of course all seconds are used. We are always doing something. It’s what we fill the seconds with that gives them their value.

Time is precious because it has the potential to be filled with wonder, love, peace, fulfillment and any number of other amazing things. What’s even cooler is that we get to decide what to put in it. Wow.

Of course, none of us truly knows when we will run out of “ticks”. So, I am spending some of mine thinking about how I really want to spend them. It turns out, even considering the Amazing Gift is rewarding.