Every once in a while, I feel myself slipping oh, so gently, into a minor funk. It usually happens when I sit around more than I should doing Quadrant 4 activities on the Covey 7 Habits Time Management Matrix. Quadrant 4 activities, for those of you who don’t know, are those that are not urgent and not important. Basically, they’re time wasting stuff that adds little value to your life. Most people stuck in Quadrant 4 activities are avoiding something.
That would be me. And that’s the reason why I begin to slip a little into a funk.
I hate it when I get like that, and I always have to be deliberate and conscious about then pulling on my big girl panties. That means making an effort to take proactive action to do something to lift myself out of the rut I’m sliding into. It’s hard because when one is in “a funk”, the last thing they want to do is make any effort to do anything.
Several weeks ago, I rediscovered a slim volume called 20,000 Days and Counting. I must have kept that book during the great personal library purge before we moved to Florida. That it survived means it made a serious impact on me at some point in the past when I was reading a bunch of self-development and inspirational books.
I pulled it out of its row and laid it face up on top to remind me to read it again soon. Last week, as I felt the blues starting to come on, I went to my bookshelf for a new book to read. That book staring up at me weeks ago felt right that day.
They say timing is everything. It certainly was that morning. I went out to the lanai to read. The weather, as it is in October in SW Florida, was really perfect. A light breeze was blowing, the sky was blue with beautiful puffy white clouds, temperatures in the low 80s. I sat for a few minutes thinking about how blessed I am to live in paradise. There’s nothing about counting your blessings outside in beautiful weather to help start a funk lifting.
Then I began to read the book. The subtitle of 20,000 Days and Counting is The Crash Course for Mastering Your Life Right Now. Written by a not-famous man named Robert D Smith, his biography on the book jacket says that he’s spent his life behind the scenes and away from the spotlight. The Foreword of his book, from Andy Andrews (whose career Robert D Smith has managed since the very beginning), says that Smith’s success is because of the way he thinks, and that the way he’s trained himself to think has become the way he acts.
This slim volume, only 105 pages, many of which only have title or quotes on them, can be read in under an hour. I know this for sure because I’ve read it 5 times in the last 8 days. Still, it’s chock full of real wisdom. It did, indeed, lift me out of the funk I was slipping into and got me fired up to take charge of my thinking (and my actions) again. There’s so much good stuff in there, I wanted to internalize it so I never forget it. That’s why I read it 5 times last week.
Smith wrote the book as a review of the first 20,000 days of his life (midway through his 54th year), and to recap the plan he made for his next 20,000 days. Each short chapter begins with a quote about time. As I’ve written about in this blog before, you can’t store time. Smith contends we need to use our time wisely to accomplish critical tasks, celebrate milestones, and touch lives because (and this is the most important point of all) today could be our last day.
Chapter 5 is titled “If We Can Learn How to Die, We’ll Know How to Live.” That sounds a bit morbid, but he says the best preparation for living well is to be prepared to die at any time. There’s some truth to that. He tells us to be constantly asking 1) What is important now? and 2) What comes next? Those 2 questions will help keep our priorities straight. I think that’s true and may even work (when I remember to do it) when I begin to wallow around Quadrant 4 too much.
Chapter 6 deals with being in a state of intensity. Intensity is not a state of mind, but rather a state of emotion. We have to have an emotional connection to the things we choose to do, and that emotional connection is what makes every day count. He contends that deep down we know what counts. We just need to focus on it. I know that trying to get each of the 252 games on each of the 6 levels of Mahjong Deluxe under 3 minutes doesn’t matter that much, and I need to find something else to focus so much of my time and energy on.
Chapter 7 gives us a really good reason to eat dessert first. The quote that starts the chapter is from British Author Austin Dobson. It says “Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.” I love that. A lot.
My favorite quote though, a quote I never want to forget, and that could easily guide the rest of my life is from another British Author, Charles Buxton. He says, “You never will find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” It’s true. You make time by taking it away from things that matter little, and spending it instead on things that matter most.
The whole book is a call to action, a kick in the pants that I really needed. And I’m going to read it another 5 times before I squirrel it away on my bookshelf to be pulled back out another 10 years from now.
P.S. What matters most today if you live in the United States is that you vote. Please vote, not forgetting that a vote is not a valentine, but your choice for creating the kind of country you want (and want your progeny) to live in.
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