About Those Extra Hours...

Barbara Kingsolver, in her lovely book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle wrote about figuring out a way home from college that saved her 37 minutes on the drive.  Upon arriving home and telling her family about this incredible navigational feat, her grandfather mused, "Thirty-seven...and here you just used up fifteen of them telling all about it.  What's your plan for the other twenty-two?"

She goes on to say something that rocked my day...maybe my life:

Good question.  I'm still stumped for an answer, whenever the religion of time-saving pushes me to zip through a meal or a chore, rushing everytbody out the door to the next point on the schedule.  All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation.  Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for.  On the other hand, attending to the task in front of me--even a quotidian chore--might make it into part of a good day, rather than just a rock in the road to someplace else.

Wasn't I just complaining about not having enough time in a day?  It was just what I needed to hear today.