I recently came across an aged man in the elevator. The doors were shutting, and at the last second, I wedged my hands and forced them open. Once inside, this guy looks at me and says, “You need to slow down son, life is too short to be going so fast. Stop and smell the roses.”
This seemed quite ironic to me given the fact that he was like 100 years old. Anyhow, I pondered that thought on my way from the first to the 14th floors.
This event did not motivate me to want to create a Bucket List like Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in a movie by the same name. What it did do is make me realize that if life is indeed short, as my elevator companion suggested, then I better start going twice as fast as I normally do.
I have created a list of some time-saving items:
1. Sign all your blank checks as soon as you get them from the bank. That way you will save time having to sign each one as you write them in the future. An added benefit is eliminating the chance of having your check returned by the bank because of a suspicious signature, like when you have to sign one while you are drunk.
2. Park as close to the cart return in the parking lot as you can. That way when you are done loading the car you don’t have to look for a cart return area. That is assuming that you actually return your cart instead of just ditching them anywhere. While I am on the subject, would the person whose errant cart hit my 1972 Green Maverick at the Target in Riverhead on February 12 please come forward?
3. Shopping late at night will you save time in the check out line. You might have to give up “Letterman” or “Leno” one night a week but there’s always “Conan” or “Kimmel.”
4. Only patronize businesses that are located on the ground level. This saves time with stairs and escalators, elevators, etc. I didn’t come up with this one until after my elevator experience.
5. Consider dropping your kids off at school a couple hours early so you don’t have to fight the traffic in the drop-off area. More school equals more education.
6. Only eat at restaurants that have low patronage. This way you never have to wait in line and service is faster. Look for those with the lower sanitation ratings.
7. When at home, only eat microwavable meals. Microwaves cook at twice the speed of conventional ovens. It also saves time having to add salt to your meal, as most of these types are already loaded with sodium.
8. Drive safely but get to the speed limit as quick as possible. That’s why they advertise on all those commercials “0-60 miles per hour in 4.2 seconds.”
9. Kiss you spouse or loved on all at once for the entire week. Also, never waste time on Public Displays of Affection.
10. Speed reading doesn’t work so only read books of 60 pages or less.
11. Limit television watching to no more than five hours per day.
12. Sleep less. There is no need for more than six hours sleep per night. As the saying goes, you can sleep when you die.
13. Clean the house only in the spring. That is why they call it Spring Cleaning.
14. Hold your bladder until you can’t hold it anymore. A single trip to the restroom versus two smaller trips is better.
I estimate that these alone will give you perhaps as much as an additional 16 hours per week free time. But be sure to use that time wisely. Now that I have so much additional time, I have taken up Island Bird Watching.
Interesting piece, but do you know the speed of time, or the size of a second?
Most people would question the importance of knowing at what speed their life occurs. Many people would even be quite surprised to know that life on planet Earth happens at a particular rate in the first place, or that their “future” comes from a particular direction. But it does.
The Earth travels- unnoticed by most – about 1.6 million miles each day on its annual 584 million mile trip around the sun. That works out to be approximately 18.5 miles per second. Although there are multiple methods of keeping time now in use in civilization such as Atomic Time, UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), and others, they all have pretty much evolved and been incorporated into our man made subjective world as ways of increasing the accuracy of the initial solar based system of monitoring the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Without a system of time and evolved human consciousness that relates to it, there would be no “past” or “future” for one to consider -only a continuous “now.” Consequently, one would also have to agree that a life which is measured with a system of “years” (trips around the sun) would be evolving at the relative speed of the Earth revolving around the Sun. That’s how fast the “future” is coming toward us.
This fact can be very useful if one is endeavoring to create a successful subjective reality for oneself. If one realizes that each second is one 18.5 mile long moment, and understand life as a succession and compilation of these moments, like atoms building matter, or pixels building an electronic image, one can better and more accurately build a personal life experience.
Prior to the existence of consciousness or time, we were born into a world of only dark and light, a continuous inseparable oscillation of two opposing conditions, to which our bodies responded cellularly. Through “circadian” switches, our genes responded to the absence or presence of light, or electrical energy radiating from our sun. We existed solely in the state of “continuous now” with neither means nor need to go beyond its inherent blissful ignorance.
Now we are born into a world with a past and a future that is assembled individually and collectively as a result of individual choices made in the context of each moment, or second. In the world of subjective man, existing realities are a result of prior choices and decisions made in the sequence of prior moments. It is best represented mathematically as Un = Un-1 + Un-2; Un representing the continuous now or current moment, and Un-1 and Un-2 being the two moments prior to the current moment. This is known as the Fibonacci Recurrence Series of Whole Numbers, and represents the method and proportion by which all things -including life forms, corporations, relationships and wars – evolve in this universe.
Seeing each second as an individual particle that collectively creates a whole human life experience is key to seeing the truth of many aspects of life. That fact, together with the understanding that choice of response to the ever-evolving possibility that each moment possesses creates the texture, flavor and potential of subsequent moments, allows one to see the schematic by which all realities are created in this universe. In the case of modern man, our life experiences are a result of choices that were made before we were born, and choices that continue on and become our individual responsibility when we choose to or are obliged to create a life of our own.
Many people do not realize that their choices are leading their way, just as many people do not realize that the Earth is revolving and orbiting around the Sun and instead see the Sun as rising and setting each day. Realizing the consistency, directness and measure by which subsequent moments always occur can give one relief, to a large degree, from the fear of the unknown. Knowing that the universe provides for moments to be seen and utilized in this manner and at this consistent rate for individual choices to be made and changes affected can be very beneficial to achieving ones goals in life.
Of course, knowing how to make proper choices in those moments is a whole other matter.