Time

“If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do…"

When a song insists on playing in my head for minutes or hours or days, there’s always something that one part of my brain is trying to tell another part, through the music. Sometimes I hear the message; sometimes, just the song.

I recognize the message of the above. Time in a Bottle, Jim Croce's love ballad, has always reminded me of something he didn't intend to say to those who listened. Croce died in a plane crash, not so long after writing it. So, when it gets stuck on "play" in my consciousness, I’m reminded of how little time we each have — and how little we know about when that time will end.

For me, the importance of all this is not so much to pack life with the most of everything I want to get out of it, because I can’t ever succeed at that. While there’s life, there will always be the far goal, along with the many little nearby ones. I can’t possibly do everything I think I might like to do — and what I think I might like to do often looks, from the other side, after having done it, less important.

So, for me, the key is to avoid doing what I know I'll otherwise feel guilty about having done; and to gather the will to do what, I know, I'll otherwise feel guilty about not having done.