Time Keeps on Slippin’

“Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin
Into the future …”
- Fly Like an Eagle, Steve Miller Band

So You Want to Know More

How many times have you said to yourself, “There are so many things I’d like to learn more about, but I just can’t ever seem to find the time.”  We all feel that way. The truth, however, is that there is more time available to you than you may realize.  The Jewish approach to “finding time” is by creating beachheads.  This means not only being aware of the large chunks of committed time that already fill our schedules, but also searching for those times when we’re not doing much other than just letting time slip away—or killing it.

Ask yourself, how many five, ten, fifteen minutes of down time are there in your daily or weekly routine? Once you have located these little islands of time, you need to look for creative ways to fill even these small amounts of time with things you “just can’t ever find the time to do.”

You may want to know more about health care reform, WWII or what’s in the Torah, but feel overwhelmed by how much there is to learn, and how much time it will involve.  The result is that you may never get started at all. In response to this natural all-or-nothing tendency, Jewish consciousness emphasizes the need to spend at least a little time every day expanding the horizons of your knowledge.

A Gift Called Time

Nights are ideal for creating a little beachhead in time. Try this for a week. After dinner, for just ten minutes, don’t turn on the television, check your email, Facebook any friends or dive back into the work you brought home from the office. Instead, try putting aside ten minutes to read something about whatever it is you have always been curious about but never had the time to study. Just think, by finding ten minutes a night you are actually discovering over fifty hours a year.  Keep that up for a few years and before you know it you’ll know many of the things you always wanted to know.

Give yourself a little gift this week.  The gift of time.

“Do not say ‘when I have the time then I’ll study,’ because
you may never find the time.”
- Talmud