On the importance....................

 ........................of starting the clock.

Can we please stop..............................

 ..............................this time change thing?

times..........................

 This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, as culled from his 1837 speech, The American Scholar

a two-minute warning.................

      It is interesting to watch football teams on a Sunday afternoon.  They spend the first fifty-eight minutes routinely following the game plan they thought would result in victory.  Then something rather remarkable happens.  An official walks onto the center of the field and announces what has become known as the "Two-Minute Warning."

      What happens in the next one hundred and twenty seconds is frequently awesome.  We often witness more intensity, more cleverness, more expended energy, and more action compacted into those two final minutes than occurs in the previous fifty-eight.

      Why?

      A sudden awareness of the sense of imminent defeat, and a birth of a new and sharpened sense of urgency.  The participants know that the clock will show no favoritism.  The clock will merely do what clocks are supposed to do:  they will tick away the seconds until the game is finally over. 

      The team that finds itself on the threshold of defeat night have shown an extraordinary level of ingenuity and intensity at any time throughout the game.  They had the potential and the opportunity to outscore their opponents early in the game.  But sometimes, despite their intentions, the players make only an average effort until it is too late.  Sometimes the blowing of the whistle announcing the two-minute warning is merely a formality signifying the probability of impending and irreversible defeat.

      And so it is with the individual human life.

-Jim Rohn, The Five Major Pieces To The Life Puzzle

Interplay.............................

      Mentally, we are all time travelers  We might exhort one another to live in the moment, but the truth is that we can't, we don't—and wouldn't want to.  What give life meaning is the rich and constant interplay between past, present, and future.

-Margaret Heffernan,  Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

A lament........................

"I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task."

-John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton  (Lord Acton)

Don't forget....................

"Long-term focus is great. But the long run is just a collection of short runs that need to be managed."

-Morgan Housel, as lifted from here

Yes, it is.................................

Creatures..........................

32.  Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous:  being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity, marking the swiftness of change in each created thing, and contrasting the brief span between birth and dissolution with the endless aeons that precede the one and the infinity that follows the other.


-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations,  Book IX

One reason why......................

...................................I majored in History.  The professors never scheduled a class before 10:30.  Times were simpler back then.

A new opportunity..........................

As extracted from this Strategic Learner post.

Just in case you forgot.........................

There was a time.....................................

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