Aging Capriciously

Do you want to become a “Time Millionaire?” A Time Millionaire has learned how to wisely invest time and get more back than most of us would believe possible. Investing time is a lot like investing money. You cannot make money if you do not invest money. You may make a salary each week, but no one ever became a millionaire on just a salary. If you want to make a great deal of money, you must invest money and of course, that means taking a risk. A good business person is willing to take “prudent” risks. The same applies to getting more time in your life. You must invest time to make time. The time that you get each day is your “salaried” time. You will never become a “Time Millionaire” on just your weekly “salary” of time. You must invest time to make millions in time and that means taking a risk. The risk is that your time investment might not work out and you will not receive the extra time you hope to have earned.

Have you ever noticed that successful people seem to be able to accomplish so much? They seem to have more time than the rest of us. Their secret is that they have learned the ins and outs of “time investing.” Most of the rest of us just hoard our time. Hoarding time is like putting your money under the bed. It will not do you any good there. You must spend time to make more time. What you spend your time on is the key. It is the principle that applies to what you spend your money on. If you spend your money on buying frivolous things, you will not make money. If you spend your time on frivolous pursuits, you will not make more time. How can time multiply? The same way that money multiplies. Other people will lend, give or sell you their time and the multiplier effect works the same way with time that it does with money.

Smart business people invest with other people’s money. Smart time managers invest with other people’s time. Following are three keys to wise time investment. The first key is to learn how to ask other people for help. A smart time manager know when to aks others for help. A second key is to learn how to network and create more leverage from those you know and also those you don’t know. This key helps you build a larger network of people who may be smart investments. A third key is to generously give time to other people. This time will come back to you many times over when these same people will someday be happy to provide you with their time or help you later on.

Watching TV each week is not investing time. Helping a friend, going back to school, working on a part-time business, writing a book, learning to play an instrument are all good investments of time. When you invest time in worthwhile goals and in worthwhile people you will soon find your time multiplying. You will begin to accomplish more and more by spending less and less time. You will soon find you are becoming rich with time. You are on your way to becoming a “Time Millionaire.” You will someday have more time and accomplish more than you ever dreamed was possible.

How much of your time is spent frivolously each week? How much time are you spending watching TV or watching sports? How much time are you spending on good investments? How could you increase the amount of time you invest each week?

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. How many times have you seen or heard this little phrase? It would almost be trite if it were not so powerful a thought. Did you get up this morning and think: “The rest of my life starts now” or “Today is a new beginning” or “I can start all over and lead a new life.” I would bet you got up, took a shower, got dressed, made a coffee and went out the door, praying for the roads to be good and that there is little traffic. You also made a note to try to get up a little earlier tomorrow. You have been making these notes for twenty years but seldom do they work, so you are now rushing to get to work on time. Thoughts of a new beginning or a new day are far far away. And so, a new day began for you, but NOT a new set of opportunities.

The opportunities are only there for the people that can take the time to seize them. We are often too busy rushing to even see the opportunities for a new life and a new start that surrounds us. We continue to live today exactly as we did yesterday and we wonder “when, oh when, will things chance?” Well, think about it, as someone once said the definition of craziness is “keep doing the same things and expect different results.”

When will you seize the opportunity to change your life, to see things differently, to begin a new day with new commitments, to improve your life and to begin the life you dream of living? If you keep doing the same things you did yesterday and the day before, nothing will change for you. Do you want to live a better live? Do you want to improve your life?

Then right now make a list of things that you would like to see different in your life. Do you want to travel more? Do you want to make more money? Do you want to have more love and romance in your life? Now from your list, prioritize the things that are most important to you. Take one thing today and make today the day that you start working towards that goal. Each week start working on one goal or one priority. Before you know it, you will be living the life that you want to live and not the one you HAVE to live.

Horny Time – Do you find it difficult to talk about sex? Most Americans seem to have a fixation with sex but a very difficult time to talk openly about it. According to Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of “The Female Brain,” men think about sex every 52 seconds, while women tend to think about it just once a day. Apparently, men are thinking about sex a great deal more than women. I believe this “finding” reflects a stereotype about men and women in a traditional orientation to sex. In our world today, symbols and elements of sex are ubiquitous. We are bombarded with an average of 1500 advertisements a day and many of these rely on the old adage “sex sells.” Both men and women are getting “sexier” regardless of how often each supposedly thinks about it.

Recent studies show that the older men get, the “softer” they get. Forty four percent of American men over sixty report having a problem with getting an erection. Men might be thinking about sex but a great deal but with many it does not go much further than that. Why spend so much time thinking about something, when we can’t do anything about it? Of course, with the right drugs, we can all become overnight sex studs.

On one level, we treat sex as a normal part of everyday life, but at a deeper level, we are still like little kids for whom sex is naughty and evil. We never quite get over those childhood messages about sex being bad. As adults, we think about sex, dream about sex and fantasize about sex. We watch movies where everyone has marathon sex bouts in which they go at it all night long and start over again in the morning. When most of us measure our reality against such fantasies, reality comes up short. Thus, we prefer not to talk about reality. We ignore it or pretend we don’t have a problem but the problem does not go away. Our sex lives seldom measure up to the Hollywood standard.

Problems that are not dealt with sometimes get better, but more often they get worse.
How much time do you spend talking about sex openly and candidly with your significant other? Can you talk about what you like and what you don’t like? What turns you on and what turns you off? Do you put time away each week or every so often to talk about sex? How would you rate your sex life? What would it take to improve it?

“Taming Time” would be an interesting title for a book. I typed this phase “Taming Time” in on the Amazon Book site and came up with 417 hits. A quick look down the results showed numerous books with this title. Most of them seemed to focus on time management or tips to “tame” time. The metaphor or allusion to time seems to indicate that it is a wild beast that needs to be tamed. However, have you ever tried to tame a wild beast? Would you trust a so called tamed lion or tiger around your children? Can we really time a wild beast?

If time is a wild beast, are we perhaps kidding ourselves by thinking that “201 tips” on time will tame this beast? What if time were not tamable? What if we just had to live with this beast? Perhaps there is a better opportunity for an original book on time titled: “Living with the Beast of Time.” Well, how do we go about living with a wild beast? I suppose you must have plenty of patience, courage and awareness towards the beast. You might always have to be on guard for some moment when the beast reverts to its natural state. You could never fully trust that the beast might not someday become wild and violent.

If you are living with a wild creature, you have to respect it. A lack of respect could really get you in trouble with a lion or tiger. I think the same is true for time. Do you respect time? How do you treat the time in your life? Do you see it as a wild or domesticated creature? Do you think you can tame it?

Time and priorities seem to go hand in hand. Some say that time is all about setting priorities. I often think that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, a more honest reply would be: “It’s not that important to me or not as important as the other things going on in my life right now.” In some time management courses, they teach you to understand the distinction between important and urgent. Some things are both important and urgent and thus you should attend to them right away, others are urgent but not important. The phone ringing tends to define a sense of urgency as it screams to be attended to. We rush to pick it up, only to find a telemarketer on the other end. Other things are important, but do not need to be done right away, thus we put them off and sometimes never seem to get the truly important things done in our lives. We may reflect on these failures when it is too late, as in telling someone we really love them, after they are dead. However, we are too busy with the urgent to spend time on the important.

The no-brainers are the unimportant and un-urgent. Yet, how many of us occupy our time with these true time wasters: the daily news, the TV set, gossip or trivia about sports or movie stars or what so and so wore to the wedding. Studies show the average person watches 3-6 hours of TV a day. Can you think of anything on TV that falls into the urgent or important categories? Yet, how often do you say “I have no time?” What if you answered: “I am sorry, I don’t have the time, I have to watch 6 hours of TV tonight before going to bed?” What would you think if someone said that too you? It might be refreshing if people were more honest.

What method do you use to set priorities in your life? Do you think you have your priorities well balanced? If not, what could you do to better balance your priorities? How much time do you spend on the unimportant and un-urgent each week? How much time to you spend on the truly important? How much time do you spend dealing with the simply urgent? Are you always fighting fires and never getting the important tasks done? Dr. W.E. Deming used to say, “Putting out the fires, does not improve the hotel.”

Friday, Friday, too much too say about this day! Black Friday, Freaky Friday, Good Friday; Casual Friday, Unlucky Friday, TGIF! Can you believe a chain of restaurants, a god and more songs than I could list named after this day? Friday, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon form of Frigga, the Germanic goddess of beauty. Frigga was the goddess of love, marriage, and destiny. She was the wife of the powerful Norse god Odin, The All-Father.

If there were a magic day, it would be Friday. You know the reason why too, don’t you? The last day of the week, payday, the day that three day weekends begin on and a holy day as well. The Easybeats sing: “Monday, I’ve got Friday on my mind.” We can all identify with that song, since many of us start thinking about Friday as soon as we are headed to work on Monday. Even those of us who love our work, often look forward to this last day in the week, the day before our weekend break begins and frequently the day we begin it on early. In Japan, Friday is Kin-Youbi: “Gold Day” or “money day”, and in many Asian cultures, paydays are on Friday (Wikipedia). Friday for others has often been associated with the dreaded pink slips. Instead of getting paid, you receive your layoff notice. Love it, hate it, dread it, fear it, but you cannot ignore Friday.

What do Fridays mean to you? Have Fridays more often been good to you or bad? Do you anxiously wait for each Friday or do you take your days one at a time? What do you like most about Fridays? What if we had a four day week and skipped Fridays? How would you feel about that? Would you miss your Fridays?

Glory time! Halleluiah! Are you waiting for glory time? “It will be a glorious day in heaven that awaits all repentant sinners. However, the fires in hell will burn brighter as they consume the bones and blood of those who fail to repent. Today is Glory Day. Lift up thine eyes to heaven so that you may see what awaits you. The downcast will be lifted up and the exalted will be cast down.” Or so it has been said!

Well, perhaps I exaggerate some, but what could be a more glorious time for some then the day they rise up to get their just rewards? More immediate but more mundane times of glory may await those of us who prefer to tarry on this earth. Many of us yearn for a day of glory; to rise on the pedestal and be recognized for a “once in a lifetime” achievement. – To have a crowd of friends and admirers all standing there to cheer at our success – We have the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Bowl Games, the Super Bowl, the World Series, American Idol and a zillion playoffs, but most of us will never attend one of these, much less play in one or win one.

For most ordinary people, our glory time will be winning a local soccer tournament, or taking first place in our third-grade spelling bee. A good friend of mine recently received notice that he was going to be inducted into an academic Hall of Fame. I once took second place in a father-daughter canoe race. I still keep the trophy. It is the only trophy I have ever received. The irony is that regardless of how small these accomplishments may seem to others, we will never forget the moment or the time of our glory. For the rest of our lives, we will remember our moment of glory. There may be other glory times or more significant times, but glory times are like precious moments of happiness, they come and go all too fast for our liking. That is their nature; can you imagine spending days and weeks in glory time? When was your last glory time? What do you remember about it? Why was it important to you then and now?

Daytime! You wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is “It’s daytime, I have a lot of things I want to do today.” Or perhaps you think “Another day, I wish I did not have to go to work.” For some of us, daytime is exciting and energizing. For others, we just want to turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. I prefer to think that daytime marks the start of a new day with new challenges and opportunities. It is a chance to realize my hopes and dreams. I know that for some, daytime brings fears and maybe even more pain and dread. It may be the continuation of a bad dream that they do not know how to get out of or a bad story that started the day before and does not seem to end.

Perhaps our difference in perspective lies in the element of Hope. Hope is a gift that “gives vision to the mind, strength to the will, courage to the heart, and endurance to the body.” (My Daily Bread, by Anthony J. Paone, 1954, Confraternity of the Holy Blood) With hope, we can look forward to the possibility that we can change, our lives can change, others can change and the world can change. Hope is the belief that things can be better today than they were yesterday. It is the belief that we can make a difference in the world. Hope means that I can change my dreams into reality. It is never too late to start to hope. Hope will carry you through the times when life seems hopeless.

What does daytime mean to you? What role does hope play in your daily life? When you wake up in the morning, how do you feel about starting a new day? Is it exciting and energizing or fearful and painful? Do you believe that you can and will make a difference today? What would it take to put you into the category of people who greet each day with excitement and enthusiasm? Are you happy to continue with your present outlook on life or do you want to get more out of life? How can you start? Where can you look? Who could help you in your journey? How can you find more hope in your life? What or whom could help you to renew the hope that you may have lost?

There is no shortage of time poetry or poetry about time. The website http://www.poemhunter.com/poems/time/ has many excellent poems on time. You could spend hours reading the wonderful poems about time and its effects on people’s lives. I recently borrowed some ideas from this poetry and wrote Karen a poem on time for her while she was in Phoenix visiting our daughter. She told me when she returned that it was the first time that anyone had ever written her a poem. I thought that was sad since we have been married now for over 20 years and neither I nor anyone else had ever written her a poem. I think everyone should have a poem written for them at least once in their lives and the subject of time is a good place to start.

If you peruse some of the poetry at this website, you will find some excellent ones but some that are just okay. I think it is like that with anything. We have good stuff and we have average stuff and some bad stuff. However, we let the outstanding scare us from attempting because we say “Oh, I could never write that well.” Well, you might be able to or you might not but it really does not matter. Not everyone will be a Tiger Woods or a Michael Jordan, but that should not deter anyone from playing golf or basketball; likewise with writing poetry or a book or doing anything else. There is always room in this world for more creativity, for more poetry, for more stories.

If you don’t start now, then when will you start? Write your loved one a poem today, just for them. Write it about time or about anything else that is special for you. Give it to them and see what they think. You don’t have to be a great poet, but who knows, maybe you are.

September is the ninth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar and one of four Gregorian months with 30 days. September is my favorite month of the year. For me, September is the beginning of fall. Autumn is well underway by the beginning of September and by the middle of September the leaves will soon start changing. Technically fall does not begin until September 21st, but we all know that the real end of summer is on Labor Day.

In many parts of the world, summer ends when students head back to school (They are already back in Wisconsin and in Minnesota will head back tomorrow). The fall weather and temperatures are perfect (for me anyway) and I love the changing colors of the landscapes. I love the cool crisp air and the beauty of the trees, shrubs and falling leaves. I love the many fall flowers and the bright red Sumac bushes. The flowers and red bushes are soon complimented by the Oaks, Maples and Popular trees which will contribute bright yellows, oranges and reds to the panoply of colors. The leaves have an almost ethereal quality as they float to the ground and cover it in a rich collage of hues and tones. However, when the leaves start gently falling, the end of fall comes too soon for me.

I should mention that I was born in September and of course my birthday will bring some treats. However, I would still love the fall with or without my birthday. Many people do not feel the same why that I do about the fall, particularly in Minnesota. Karen does not enjoy September nearly as much as I do. She did not like getting up this morning when it was 47 degrees and she regrets the acorns that are already starting to scatter on the ground. She says she can only think that when fall comes, winter will soon be here.

In some parts of the world, fall lasts somewhat longer than in Wisconsin. Weather-wise, we have a two month fall that covers September and October. Never mind that the calendar says fall ends on December 20, it really ends right after Halloween. By then the colors are over and most of the leaves need to be raked up. Not to mention, we generally have snow long before the “end” of fall. Well, in four weeks, we will be headed to Arizona so I will miss the winter but hopefully catch most of the fall up here.

What is your favorite month of the year? Why? What is your favorite season of the year? Do you enjoy each season or do you have a special season you look forward to?