The Potential To Waste

I caught myself.

Driving down the mountain, looking at the haze in the air, that wispy harbinger of the 90-degree day just then in blossom, I caught myself in a familiar and hated ritual: rehearsing and rehashing all the resentment and distaste I have for the behavior of the people with whom I work every day. Like most people, the quotidian necessities of my life require that I spend a large portion of my life in close contact with a group of people with whom — if I had a realistic choice — I would not even be near for more than five minutes. All the petty squabbles, the laziness and lack of work ethic, the naked jockeying for status, the vapid commitment to the today’s world and its values…these things are corrosive, and they have cut channels into me that will likely never fade in this lifetime.

These thoughts were swarming in my head, stinging me, moving me to frown and bite a groove into my lips, all in a cloud of irony as the lovely song “Our Shangri La,” as sung by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, was echoing in my head.

And then I caught myself.

My mind and the thoughts it produces tends to be simple and simplistic, the sort of mental machinery at which more gifted men smile with benign tolerance. This was a source of insecurity years ago, but I have come to peace with the fact — fact — that I simply am not a deep man, not a profound man. And when I yield to pride and try to affect depth and profundity, well….my attempts likely produce even more smiles.

But just now and then, I conjure thoughts that are profound to me, and for me. And this morning during my Two Minutes of Hate, I had one of those thoughts. And the thought went something like this:

I am wasting my life at this moment. Here I am, fretting over wrongs and injustices and frustrations and disappointments, and yet I am expending these mental and spiritual calories on a day that has been given to me, and there will never be another day like this one, and the God Who placed me here does not hate me and does not want me to see my life as an onerous burden, but rather wants me to enjoy it, to learn from its ticking minutes, to revel in it, to take a childlike delight in its many twists and obstacles and wonders and possibilities. The time I spend worrying about what other people have done — other people who, incidentally, are all walking their own difficult paths today — is time I cannot recapture, cannot redeem, cannot turn to good use. The time I’ve been given is truly a gift. This day is a gift, a more seasoned edition of the days I was given as a child, days when I wandered through a world of awe and experience and sensation. And I’m a fool if I continue to waste this time, this day, in this fashion.

The thought was likely the by-product of a weekend spent reading and reflecting, and is heavily flavored by my having gotten myself all Arkled-up. And the thought made me glad, and I held onto it, and am holding it close to me even now.

The day is precious. The day is a gift. And the One Who gave it to me would be saddened if He saw me waste it or toss it aside. I think God loves His children, and because He loves them, He is affected when He sees them do things that He knows will have unpleasant effects. I think I matter to Him. Most days, when I am not on a wrong path in my distractions, He matters to me.

It seems to me that all I really have is with me right now. And that’s pretty good.

~ S.K. Orr