Time

"Now my journey has been long and filled with many experiences. My future in this body form grows shorter. The pace of time moves very quickly, and I want to make the most of it. When I was a child, the milestones I counted were the number of years that I had lived, and the future seemed boundless. Now that the limits draw near, I reckon time by how much is left.

Yes, time is all I have, and yet I do not have it either. I cannot possess this moment because it is mercurial and constantly in motion. It is as Einstein said: "For us believing physicists, this separation between past, present, and future has the value of mere illusion, however tenacious."

It is easy to become a time miser or a time squanderer, but I am warned by the words of Thoreau: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." I do not wish to be like the man Kierkegaard told of, who was so busy all of his life that he did not know he was alive until he died. I want to "use" my time wisely. That hour of play that my mother gave me as a child seemed endless. Now, the hours go before I know it. The months, years, decades go by. The young can afford to waste time; the old hold on to it. I want only to savor it - to move in its flow both carefully and trustingly."

From Flying Without Wings. Arnold R. Beisser, M.D. (1988) (pg 13, special reprint edition, permission of Doubleday) (ISBN: 0385247702)