If you were stopped in the street and asked what is the most important thing a person could have, what would you say?
Some—maybe most—would say money, a fast car or even their partner. In my view, the most important thing in life is something we all have and that hardly anyone values enough today: **time**.
There’s a saying that time waits for no one. It’s practically a resource we lose a little of every day. So we should make the most of each day and do things that fill us up, spending time with people who make us happy.
If you simply seize the moment instead of putting off what you could do today, you’ll be surprised how much you can achieve.
The moments we live are the raw material for creating something meaningful. If we don’t use them well, we’ll end up with nothing. Without the passage of time, all our experiences would be squeezed into a single snapshot.
With the passage of time, though, they turn into a film full of colours, scents and people. Perhaps the meaning of our life is exactly that: to be able to enjoy the film that these moments create, from start to finish. We are the ones making that film. We may not get to write the epilogue, but we are responsible for most of the story.
Imagine a world where time didn’t matter—where whatever we did could always be postponed. Moments with friends, activities, travel. Everything could be put off and eventually lost in the daily routine we mistakenly treat as what matters most. How empty and colourless that world would be.
Many of us live like that. And that’s sad, because they live as if they’ll never die, and in the end they die as if they had never really lived.
When your time is full and you look back, be sure you won’t be asking how much wealth you built, but how you lived. What you gave up to do something else, and what people you met.
If you travelled, what did you learn from the hardships? Did the life you lived truly fill you—so that if you died tomorrow, you’d have no regrets?
Don’t let time slip by unused. Smile, fall in love and love with your whole heart—whether it’s your partner, your hobby or your work. Only when you do something with passion will you feel you’ve succeeded; when you travel you’ll feel richer, and when you fall in love you’ll feel full. Next time you get angry with your partner or feel wronged by something, talk about it and try to mend what’s broken.
What breaks can be glued back together. You just need to be sure it’s worth spending your precious time on.
For more on making the most of life, see There Is No Destination and 10 Habits of Happy People.
Happy Life Team
