gat

physical beauty or your wealth, your health, or your power to experience good feelings is to kid
yourself because they will be taken away. A ninety-four-year-old aunt of mine with a Ph.D. from
the University of Chicago, and a woman I love dearly, said to me tearfully after the death of her
husband, who had left her in comfortable circumstances, "They don’t let you win. There is no way
to win."
She had lived her life in the camp of science, honorably observing all its rules of rationality, but at
his passing, science was useless to her. The Western spiritual tradition would reply, "Of course
you can win. Everyone can win. And if you think you can’t, then you’re playing the wrong game."
The only thing that gives our time on earth any deep significance is that none of this will last. Only
that temporality gives our relationships any urgency. If you were indestructible, what a curse!
How could it possibly matter whether you did anything today or next year or in the next hundred
years, learned anything, loved anybody? There would always be time for anything and everything.
What would be the big deal about anything?
Everyone has known the experience of having had a surfeit of candy, company, or even money, so
that no individual purchase involves real choice because real choice always closes the door on
other choices. I know that we would all like to have endless amounts of money, but the truth is,
too much money wipes out our pleasure in choosing since we can now choose everything. That’s
what Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius discovered for himself in his reflections about what really
matters—the Meditations, one of the great classics in Western history. He discovered none of the
important things was for sale. If you don’t believe an emperor would feel this way, read the
Meditations.
Too much time, like too much money, can hang heavily on our hands as well. Look at the millions
of bored schoolchildren. They know what I mean. The corrective for this boredom is a full
spiritual awareness that time is finite. As you spend time on one thing, you lose forever the chance
to spend it on something else. Time is always a big deal.
Science can’t help with time. In fact, living scientifically so as not to waste time, becoming one of
those poor souls who never goes anywhere without a list, is the best guarantee your life will be
eaten up by errands and that none of those errands will ever become the big deal you desperately
need to finally love yourself. The list of things to do will go ever onward and onward. The best
lives are full of contemplation, full of solitude, full of self-examination, full of private, personal
attempts to engage the metaphysical mystery of existence, to create an inner life.
We make the best of our limited time by alternating effort with reflection, and I mean reflection
completely free of the get-something motive. Whenever I see a kid daydreaming in school, I’m
careful never to shock the reverie out of existence.
Buddha is reputed to have said, "Do nothing. Time is too precious to waste." If that advice seems
impossible in the world described on the evening news, reflect on the awesome fact that in spite of
hype, you still live on a planet where 67 percent of the world’s entire population has never made
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