Putting off until later what we could be doing now is a forever lost opportunity.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and 10,080 in a week. That may seem like a large number, but once they pass, those minutes are gone forever. We will never have the opportunity to do in that minute what we could have done. Of our jillions of faults,
procrastination has to be the worst. It’s always been that way, despite trying to improve.
In our elementary years, we’d always put off writing book reports until right before they were due. It wasn’t that we hated to do them, but we’d find an excuse to do something else first; such as go ride our horse.
Ours days are supposed to start at 5:30in the morning. Sometimes the alarm jars us awake, but generally we’re waiting for it to ring. Instead of jumping up and heading
out to chore, we roll over saying to ourselves: “Oh, just another five minutes.” If the wind’s howling and it’s frigid out, that extra five often becomes 20 or 25, maybe longer.
Obviously, we’ve already started the day behind. Everything we do from then on is trying to catch up. We can’t. We’ve already wasted those minutes. If we do get back on schedule, there will still be something we’ll postpone that should be done immediately.
Part of our job is making sales calls, and we often hang fire, such that they never get done. We’ll generally make the easy, sure-sells right off, but those that are likely to be “maybe” or “no” often don’t get called.
A list of story ideas is always kept, but we seem to postpone certain ones. What’s really sad is when we put one off so long that we can’t do it because of a death, accident or change of circumstances, so there’s no story there. It’s happened more than once.
Generally, we don’t dally when it comes time to ride our horses. Some people work their horses on the ground extensively, but delay mounting. One has to get on to ride, and we do right away. However, philosophy changes if the horse happens to be a tough one, and there aren’t many, but then we’ll drag our boots sometimes, too.
Warning about procrastination is given in First Thessalonians 5:2-3: “For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”
One shall never adjourn, as Jesus is quoted in Saint Matthew 24:50-51:“The Lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
We must not defer what can be done now. There will never be another chance. One advisor recommended following a commercial slogan he was familiar with: “Just do it.”
+++ALLELUIA+++