WASTED TIME
By GEORGE MATTHEW ADAMS
You cannot recall hours. They trot by in single file one by one—but they never turn and look back. When they have passed, they have gone forever.
Those hours mean all in all to you. They glitter with gold. They are saturated with the most precious perfume. They dangle with opportunities. But they say nothing. They have no publicity agenda. Their silence is as impressuve as the grave. And yet all the color of life and hope beams from their separate 60 minutes!
Walt Mason, the unique and original writer of rhymes, once spoke of these travelling hours by telling people to "ride them till their backs are sore." "For," said he, "60 minutes have you—60 minutes—and no more."
The great task of education should be, not to fill our mind with things that would clog it, but with ideas that would move other ideas through that mind—keep it clean, fit to easily and quickly grasp useful information and interests, and as quickly to discard that which might never prove of use.
Fifteen minutes today given to selected reading every day in the year would give to any man or woman a fund or information in a very short time that the wisest, a hundred years ago, would have been proud to possess.
But how many—even the most intelligent—ever give this brief space of time to additional learning? How many make it a point to hunt out some new item of information each day?
If there are days in which you find it impossible to read, a few moments given at odd times to what you have read, or seen or heard, in serious thinking, will be as fresh food to the mind.
It was said of Hercules, the god or force, that "whether he sat, or walked, or whatever he did, he conquered." So, with you, no matter where you are, or what you may be doing, think, use your eyes, and rise just a little higher in thought space.
Don't waste a single minute. You need them all. Everybody does.
