After climbing Mt. Manabu last weekend, I spent a
day or two meditating on self-refinement, concept mapping my priorities and catching
up on my Bible-reading. I am convinced that I have wasted too much time in my
20’s and I am now doing my best to sharpen my affections for God and spend the
rest of my days in purposeful living – calling to mind the words of the apostle
Paul:
See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Wherefore be ye not unwise,
but understanding what the will of the Lord is.
(Ephesians 5:15-17)
Reiterating the words of a Forbes contributor, “I’m
on a mission to simplify life, to slow it down to a pace at which it can
actually be consumed, not just tasted. I
don’t want to hide behind the ubiquitous, “I’m really busy” as a badge of
honor. I want a lower cost of living
(not just financially) and a higher quality of life. I want to limit the number of things that
compete for my attention so that I can apply more attention to those things I
care the most about.”
Certainly, less is more. Here’s what my mind map
looks like at the moment:
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| Created using https://bubbl.us/mindmap |
If it weren’t for my family and friends that I communicate with regularly through Messenger, I would have already deleted my Facebook account as I no longer find purpose in using it. Nevertheless, I spent a couple of days cleaning up my timeline, realizing that social media has ridiculously sucked time from my life even if I had somehow succeeded in increasing my self-control over the past year. I have observed that it brings out the worst in other people (even myself), and I am resolving to live a quiet life, minding my own business from now on. I just want to spend time on things that interest me (such as creative stimulation) as well as things that I think are important to be preserved, like family bonding time. Instead of superficial online interactions, I would rather have more meaningful, face-to-face connections.
2,000 years ago, Roman philosopher Seneca wrote these wise words in On The Shortness of Life:
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!
Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
