THE BUILDER JUNE 1916

THE ORDERLY LIFE
BY BRO. CHARLES SUMNER LOBINGIER, CHINA

It is almost commonplace to observe that one--perhaps the most
important--of the secrets of success in any career is a recognition
of the value of time. "Dost thou live thy life?" asks Poor Richard;
"then value thy time, for time is the stuff life is made of." It is
often said that "time is money." But the phrase is inaccurate for
time is much more than money. It is true that time may usually be
converted into money but it is by no means as easy to reverse the
process. Has not the quest of the ages been for an elixir that
would prolong life ? And what fabulous fortunes would a modern
Croesus, like the late J. P. Morgan, have given for only one
additional year!

The brevity of life and the elusiveness of time have afforded a
favorite theme for the poets from Homer down. Chaucer sang of

"The lyfe so short,
The craft so long to lerne."

Longfellow elaborates the same thought in his lines:

"Art is long and time is fleeting,
And our hearts though stout and brave
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave."
And the greatest dramatist of all time said:
"We are such stuff as dreams are made of
And our little life is rounded with a sleep."
Of course, too, the hymn writers have taken up the refrain in
sombre strains like these:
"Swift to its close ebbs forth life's little day."

* * *

"Time is winging us away 
To our eternal home. 
Life is but a winter's day 
A journey to the tomb."

THE WASTE OF TIME

Notwithstanding the paucity of time and its transcendant value
nothing is more common than the waste of it.

"Life we are told is a bubble, a shifting dream, evanescent as the
morning mists, uncertain as a young maid's promise, brittle as a
reed. And yet men proceed to deal with it as if it were as
inexhaustible as the widow's cruise." (1)

To every serious individual, however, sooner or later, there comes
a profound recognition of this truth and a painful consciousness of
this waste.

"We think at the age of twenty," said one (2) who later became an
octogenarian, "that life is much too long for that which we have to
learn and do; and that there is an almost fabulous distance between
our age and that of our grandfather. But when, at the age of sixty,
if we are fortunate enough to reach it, or unfortunate enough, as
the case may be, and according as we have profitably invested or
wasted our time, we halt, and look back along the way we have come,
and cast up and endeavor to balance our accounts with time and
opportunity, we find that we have made life much too short, and
thrown away a huge portion of our time. Then we, in our mind,
deduct from the sum total of our years the hours that we have
needlessly passed in sleep; the working-hours each day, during
which the surface of the mind's sluggish pool has not been stirred
or ruffled by a single thought; the days that we have gladly got
rid of, to attain some real or fancied object that lay beyond, in
the way between us and which stood irksomely the intervening days;
the hours worse than wasted in follies and dissipation, or misspent
in useless and unprofitable studies; and we acknowledge, with a
sigh, that we could have learned and done, in half a score of years
well spent, more than we have done in all our forty years of
manhood."

Here is another lament:

"Lost! yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, three
golden hours, each worth sixty diamond minutes. No reward is
offered for they are gone forever. Gone forever! In those bitter
words lies the sting of the moralist." (3)

But mere remorse and repining will do little to relieve this
unpleasant situation. They are helpful only as they arouse us to
action. The practical view is better expressed in such homely
maxims as these:

"Don't cry over spilt milk."

"Never too late to mend."

And the practical question is, What can be done to stay the waste?

REMEDIES

Now the first step toward curing an evil is to ascertain its cause.
And when we seek the causes of our waste of time we will find
foremost among them the lack of system. We have not put our lives
in-order. We spend our time in a haphazard fashion. We have no
fixed method of utilizing it. Hence we undertake enterprises which
we never finish because we find ere long that they should not have
been begun. If we read it is for amusement and recreation rather
than for inspiration or instruction. All this necessarily involves
waste of time and the remedy must be sought in the adoption of the
orderly life. For an essential feature of any scheme of economy is
method, order, system. Well did Pope say

"Order is heaven's first law."--

And one of the first applications of method is the analysis and
survey of our resources. If, as Franklin says, "time is the stuff
life is made of" our days are the basic elements of the stuff.

"For the structure that we raise
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build." (4)

Our days then are the units of our lives and it is to our days that
we must apply any workable scheme for improving time.

"Oh," said Thomas A. Kempis, "Oh that I had lived one day
thoroughly well." And the psalmist prayed "So teach us to number
our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

"Perdidi diem" (I have lost a day) was the lament of Rome's
imperial philosopher, Marcus Aurelius. Carpe diem! (seize the day)
was the more practical thought of the modern-minded, Horace.

But the day which we must seize is not some distant day--not even
to-morrow--but to-day.

"To-day is king" says Emerson.

And here we must face the truth that "procrastination is the thief
of time." Too many of us have planned great deeds "when we get
time" !

PLAN THE DAY

Given to-day as the unit of our life, how shall we se it and stay
the waste? Well in the first place we must plan it. Just as the
well ordered workshop has "a place for everything and everything in
its place," so the fruitful day has "a time for everything and
everything in its time."

"A time for everything;" ay there's the rub! It cannot be found,
you say. Well it will surprise you to ind how much can be done by
trying. The idler has the least time. And here we reach a second
step in the process--selection. For since we have not time or all
we must be content to exclude some. At least we must select the
most essential things. Do not fail to allow for health, character,
the moral, spiritual, and intellectual life, as well as for
business and pleasure. Without these first the day is barren.

"We live in deeds not years; in thoughts not breaths; in feelings
not in figures on a dial." Some one said of a certain octogenarian,
that in all his four score years he had never really lived fifteen
minutes !

ODD MOMENTS

It is only when we are trying to find a place in our crowded day
for even the most essential things that we come to appreciate the
value of its fragments. For just as the day is the unit of life, so
the hour is the unit of the day and the minute of the hour.

Strive as we may to make our working plan complete, the most
successful of us will always find moments, and even hours, which
have not been provided for. Here is the chance for economy. The old
adage "save the pennies and the pounds will take care of
themselves," may be adapted to the situation. "Save the moments and
the days will take care of themselves."

PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

Save some less important tasks for rainy days.

Have a good book ready for that wait at the station.

Set aside the next lull for reflection on some important problem.

It has been said of the late Grant Allen--who died in early middle
life after having written voluminously and much that will live--
"Like all men who do much in this world, he had a genius for using
up remnants of time. He had, too, an almost Gladstonian power of
concentration." (5)

MAKE THE PLAN COMPREHENSIVE

But while our days, hours and minutes deserve our first attention
we shall fail to make the most of them unless they are considered
as parts of a whole to which each is essential. Our work of to-day
is most effective when it supplements that of yesterday and
prepares that of to-morrow. Happy is the man who finds a life--
work--one to which he can devote his best energies throughout his
active years. One of the sagest remarks of Theodore Roosevelt was,
that "the best fate is to be able to work hard at something worth
while:"

But to do this effectively we must look a long way ahead and plan
for the far future. And here we encounter a paradox. Just as we
begin to realize at once the brevity and the uncertainty of life,
we must prepare to live long. For consider the consequences of any
other course ! If every man believed that to-day was his last, the
world would cease to move. Then

"Live as though you are to die to-morrow; work as though you are to
live forever."

Let us try to find our vocation; let us discover a task worth
while; and then let us take a lifetime to accomplish it.

Another source of leakage in our time is indolence and sloth. We
will not force ourselves to do what is necessary to improve our
time; it is so easy to drift and dawdle. And here the orderly life
requires the substitution of industry and diligence for idleness.
One of the most pregnant of the recorded sayings of Jesus is the
injunction, "Work while the day lasts; for the night cometh when no
man can work."

"Not many lives but only one have we; 
One, only one.
How sacred should that one life ever be
Day after day filled up with blessed toil,
Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil !"

EXECUTE THE PLAN

However complete our working plan it will avail nothing unless we
are prepared to carry it out. "Hell is paved with good intentions."
The shores of time are strewn with the wrecks of beautiful theories
whose authors had not the strength of character to venture out upon
the real ocean of life.

The execution of a matured plan is merely the most intelligent form
of what we call diligence or industry which is the handmaid of
economy in enabling us to make the most of our time.

But these virtues require an exercise of the will-- that dynamo of
the human spirit. And it has been well said that "character is
perfectly educated will." Hence our quest for a means of utilizing
time and stopping its waste ends in finding that it depends in the
last analysis upon the education of the will--i. e., the
development of character. This then is the key to the orderly life
and this alone will enable us, in Charles Kingsley's inspiring
words, to

"Do noble things
Not dream them all day long;
And so make life, death and the vast forever
One grand sweet song !"


(1) Adams (W. H. Davenport), The Secret of Success. 
(2) Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 115. 
(3) Adams, ubi supra. 
(4) Longfellow, The Builders. 
(5) Le Galleinne, Attitudes and Avowals, 205.

