TIME

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it all is possible...without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life. It is the most precious of all possessions...no one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can waste only the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow...it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour...it is there for you.

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is the matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness... the elusive price that you are all clutching for, my friends, depends on that!

If we cannot so arrange, that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, we mess up our whole life indefinitely. We never shall have any more time. We have, and we always have had, all the time there is! — Arnold Bennett