Philosophers have explained space.
They have not explained time.
It is the inexplicable raw material of
everything. With
it, all is possible; without it, nothing.
The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an
affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse
is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the
unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life!
It is yours.
It is the most precious of possessions.
A highly singular commodity, showered upon you
in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!
For remark! No
one can take it from you.
It is unstealable.
And no one receives either more or less than
you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy!
In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of
wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect.
Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour
a day. And
there is no punishment.
Waste your infinitely precious commodity as
much as you will, and the supply will never be
withheld from you.
Mo mysterious power will say:--"This man
is a fool, if not a knave.
He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off
at the meter."
It is more certain than consols, and payment of
income is not affected by Sundays.
Moreover, you cannot draw on the future.
Impossible to get into debt!
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You can only waste the passing moment.
You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you.
You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for
you.
I said the affair was a miracle.
Is it not?
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily
time. Out
of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money,
content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal
soul. Its
right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the
highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality.
All depends on that.
Your happiness--the elusive prize that you are
all clutching for, my friends!-- depends on that.
Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising
and up-to-date as they are, are not full of "How
to live on a given income of time," instead of
"How to live on a given income of money"!
Money is far commoner than time.
When one reflects, one perceives that money is
just about the commonest thing there is.
It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.
If one can't contrive to live on a certain income
of money, one earns a little more--or steals it, or
advertises for it.
One doesn't necessarily muddle one's life
because one can't quite manage on a thousand pounds a
year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and
balances the budget.
But if one cannot arrange that an income of
twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper
items of expenditure, one does muddle one's life
definitely. The
supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly
restricted.
Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day?
And when I say "lives," I do not mean
exists, nor "muddles through."
Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling
that the "great spending departments" of his
daily life are not managed as they ought to be?
Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is
not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending
to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the
food? Which
of us is not saying to himself-- which of us has not
been saying to himself all his life:
"I shall alter that when I have a little
more time"?
We never shall have any more time.
We have, and we have always had, all the time
there is. It
is the realisation of this profound and neglected
truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that
has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.
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