| Life is composed
of a large number of minutes glued together. In the first one you are
born, and in the last you die. For all the ones in between when you are
in the middle of one of them you cannot reach forward even one minute
and pull up a new minute until it is due. Also you cannot reach backward
as little as one minute and re-live it. Therefore in all your life you
only have one minute at a time. The quality of your life depends on what
you are doing with each of these precious minutes. If you spend many of
them wishing you were somewhere else, that minute will slip by unused.
Add these up, and that portion of your life will have disappeared.
If Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Everest) didn't enjoy the planning of the trip and the actual climbing of the mountain, the exhilaration of the 15 minutes on top couldn't have been worth the effort. The journey's the thing. Getting there is secondary. This insight shows up for me in so many of my efforts. If I hated every
moment of writing this book (which I don't), seeing the final product
in print will be an inadequate reward for all the effort that has gone
into the project. If a person works out every evening because they want
to look good, and the process is negative for them, they need to throw
some mental switches. Once you concentrate on the process while you
are doing it, a new level of enjoyment often opens up. |
© 2002 John D. Toellner
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