Time is Both Endless & Short, So Let’s Make the Most of It

Time is such an odd thing, isn’t it? It literally goes on forever, but that endlessness is also what makes it short. Our lives are just blips on the eternal timeline, so we need to make the most of it. Let’s talk about how.

Time is Both Endless & Short, So Let’s Make the Most of It

Of all the ways we humans have come up with to measure things, time is by far our most confusing concept to me. It has no beginning or end. It always has been and always will be…yet it resets itself every single day.  It’s the one thing we have nothing but…yet also the one thing that’s always running out.

I could go on and on. Every single saying contradicts another because time itself is contradictory. We could spend our entire lives trying to understand it, but that would just be a waste of…well, time! The only thing we can really do is make the most of it.

With that in mind, I’ve found some amazing quotes about time that I feel really express how we can harness it to better our lives. Let’s start with my favorite, shall we?

There’s no such thing as wasted time

I actually have two favorite quotes for this one. The first comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince. He wrote, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”  The second comes from Marthe Troly-Curtin, who basically said the same thing in fewer words. She wrote, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

There’s truly no such thing as a wasted minute, hour, or even entire day if you’re doing something you enjoy or spending it with someone you love. So don’t judge yourself for not spending a lazy Saturday watching movies with your kids instead of doing something “productive.” Productivity can wait. Our kids need more time with us more than anything else, anyway.

Learn to wait…

“Learn to wait. There’s always time for everything. “ I saw this one in a journal and thought it was a wonderful reminder. We live in a very fast-paced era where we expect everything to happen in a nanosecond! Case in point, did you know that a website that takes a full second to load is actually considered slow? That’s how “give it to me right now” we’ve become. Crazy, right?

Another quote that goes along great with this comes from Eric Roth’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If you’ve never heard of it or seen the movie, it’s a story about a man who ages in reverse. He writes, “For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing.”

Look, until you draw your very last breath, you still have time on your side. Slow down. Take a deep breath. Learn to wait.

It won’t make you forget…

Another one I find so inspiring goes, “Time won’t make you forget; it will make you grow and understand.” One of our most unrealistic notions of time is that if we put enough of it between ourselves and a painful event, it’ll erase that event from our memories as if it never existed.

While that may be true for little things, we could live a billion years and never forget the most tragic moments of our lives. Time can’t erase them, but it can give us a chance to understand, grow, develop scar tissue, and move forward.

Time makes us wiser

This isn’t specifically a quote about time, but I think it fits well anyway. It says, “Maturity is learning to walk away from people and situations that threaten your peace of mind, self-respect, values, morals and self-worth.” We’ve talked about how there are some things that we can only learn by getting older. Well, time and maturity go hand-in-hand, as you can’t have the latter without the former.

The more time we spend on this earth, the less content we are to put up with people and situations that make us miserable or cause us harm.

It doesn’t rewind or fast-forward, so we only have today

Mother Theresa once said, “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” Until someone actually develops a time machine, we can’t go back or forward. We only have this day, this hour, this very second. Time may be endless on its own, but we never know when it will run out for us. So, all we can do is spend THIS moment living our best life possible.

Some of your best times are yet to come

Anne Frank- who despite everything that happened to her still found a way to be optimistic-wrote, “What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven’t even happened yet.” That’s true whether you’re 8, 18, or 88.

If you’re willing to wait, willing to let time unfold, you just might find that there are still surprises in store for you. So slow down and make the most of the time you have. Remember, while endless itself, we each only get so much of it to enjoy.