Time Is Precious

Why do we consider twenty-four hours to be a day when day is

actually the period of time between dawn and dusk? Why does

the day begin at midnight? Midnight is the middle of the night,

not the middle of the day! Why do we have seven days instead

of eight? What's the reason for time? Just because we have a

calendar or a clock doesn't mean that we have more or less time.

Tick, tock, tick, tock. Sometimes it flies, sometimes it

crawls. Most of the time we can never seem to get enough of it.

To realize the value of a year, ask a student who received

a

failing grade. To recognize the value of a month, ask a mother

who gave birth to a premature baby. To appreciate the value of

a week, ask the person in need of a new heart. To know the

value of an hour, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet. To

fathom the value of a minute, ask a person who missed the

train. To actualize the value of a second, ask the person who

just avoided being hit by the train. To measure the value of a

millisecond, ask the person who won a gold medal in the

Olympics.

Imagine there's a bank that credits your account every

morning with $86,400. It keeps no balance from day to day and

every evening it deletes the part of the balance that you didn't

use. What would you do? I would draw out every last cent!

We all have a bank like this, it's called time. Every

morning it credits us with 86,400 seconds. Every night it

writes off whatever amount that we didn't use. There's no

going

...