When explaining to students the difference between a wish and a hope, I like to say that we hope for things that are possible, but we wish for things that are impossible. The question of the day: do we wish for more hope or do we hope for more wishes?

We spend barrels of time looking across the street or out the window, staring at what we wish we had. We desperately need to know what’s going on “over there” and muse whimsically on the green grass that grows way over yonder, over the hill. Time flies as our eyes wander, sometimes even seeing right through that which is right before us. We’re fixated on what we don’t have … especially time.

We spend half our lives looking ahead and the other half looking back, so it’s no wonder there is precious little time for the here and now. Cries of “I have no time!” reverberate, echoing justifications and excuses. And yet, we fret and moan. And, on the tails of lost opportunities, or at the end of our days, we may even cry inconsolably – if only we had, or had had, more time. We know better, but we choose to block out the little prying voices in our heads, heeding instead the scurrying ticks and tocks of the indifferent clock. Time marches on, and so do we, yet out of step, out of rhythm and out of sync.

How many times have we been told that “time is money”! Many have neither. It’s the same old tiring and timeless story. We just never learn.Most likely, we don’t appreciate what time we have, because … we created time and then became a slave to it. It’s ironic because though we are finite, time is infinite. Surprisingly, Zen masters would suggest that infinity is in the finite of every instant. Indeed, does anybody really know what time it is?

Benjamin Franklin reminded us that “lost time is never found again” and Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested that “the time is always right to do what is right.” The old proverb “a stitch in times saves nine” still resonates. I propose we do the math.
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PS. Thanks for reading. If you have the time, give me your thoughts.