Look Up For A Moment…..

By admin • December 2nd, 2009

Wake Up! It’s time to start living your life. We spend way too much time chasing the “things” of life instead of living the life that is important to each of us. We are going to work earlier, staying later and working when we get home, constantly chasing that next raise, promotion or award. Now, I am not saying that working to acquire “things” is not okay, but it is not the end goal. It is a means to an end, a way to enjoy life, but not the primary goal in life.

Any of you that have children can remember a time when you watched in wonder and amazement as your child played and discovered new things. Do you remember the excitement and pure joy in their faces when they finally succeeded at something or drew their first letter or number? Or the excitement they experienced just dancing around the living room for no reason. I would guess that many of us have our heads buried in our work, or even just our “lives” that we have missed the majority of these moments that often define our children’s lives. We get so immersed in what we feel is “most important” at that moment that we miss the bigger picture. Why do we live lives of frenzied desperation, instead of lives filled satisfaction and fulfilment? We look up after our career comes to a close only to find that our children are no longer children, we don’t really know our spouses anymore and we have few meaningful friendships.

I have written out a poem that I found in the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. It is an excellent book by the way, and I highly recommend reading it. The poem discusses this very same thing. The poem was originally written by child psychologist David L. Weatherford. It is called Slow Dance…..

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?

When you ask: How are you?
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done
Do you lie in you bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a goood friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say, “Hi”?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race.
Do take it slower.

Hear the music
Before the song is over.

The point here is that life is too short to struggle through long hours of doing work that doesn’t help meet our end goal. We all have to work to provide for our families and the necessities of life. But do we have to work these long hours, obsessing after that promotion, at the expense of our deeper desires. Desires that we may not even recognize because we are too busy chasing success to take time to reflect on what’s important to us.

I encourage you to take a closer look at what you do in life and why you do it. Take time to evaluate what truly matters to you and work more of those things into your life. And remember to always have a servant attitude.