Reflection in a Busy Life

When I was a pre-teen (circa 2001), I occupied much of my free time with what I liked to call “great time-wasters”. I knew that as I grew older I would not have nearly so much free time, but as long as I did I would enjoy the simple, seemingly pointless activities that fell under that term. 

One of these activities included writing select literary works of others by hand on binder paper, or typing them in the word processor on my personal computer. Santa Paws, Come Home by Nicholas Edwards specifically comes to mind; I hand-wrote probably more than half of the book on numerous sheets of binder paper. Now, I have already had two people refer to this as plagiarism, so let me refute that by clarifying that the purpose for doing this was to occupy my time with a book I liked, not to gain credit for anyone else’s work. (As an aside, it probably also gave me a lot more practice with handwriting than most of my classmates had, which likely contributed to my very legible, Arial-font-like handwriting.)

Another “time-waster” I enjoyed, which was actually prompted by my mom, was rolling a pair of dice and tallying the number of times each number 2-12 was rolled. My mom had informed me that 7 is the most common roll, and I believed her, but I wanted to see the proof in my own experiments with dice rolling (which had always been fun for me, particularly in the game of Yahtzee). So I filled several more sheets of binder paper with tallies of each number as it was rolled and beheld the “7” column reaching further down the page than any of the other numbers.

I bring these memories up to highlight how much less free time I have now. My weekdays are filled with work at my day job, taking care of my family (including our four cats), miscellaneous housework tasks and going through lots of email. My weekends are filled with grocery shopping, more housework, church and other ministry activities – and any spontaneous, fun outings we may decide to go on. Embarrassingly, on the large 4’x6′ white board on the wall in our hall upstairs, I have an unfinished “Problem of the Moment” from more than a year ago and I don’t know when I’m finally going to complete it.

But even in such a busy existence, it is possible to set aside time in a quiet setting to reflect, to ponder, to recharge and reset to make sure you are meeting your goals and not forgetting the important things in your life. It could be in the morning before starting your day, at night before going to sleep (as is the case for this particular blog post) or any other time of day when you find you have some unexpected free time. Whenever it comes, cherish it and use it wisely, for doing so will reap benefits both now and later, not the least of which are the sense of greater control, mental clarity, peace and fulfillment in life.