Time

Carl Sagan once said that human beings are like butterflies who flutter for a day, and think it is forever…

… Compared to the life span of the universe, our lives begin and end in a single day.

I have come to understand it this way.

The stars aren’t just balls of gas burning billions of miles away. They are also a reminder of the brief time we share on this planet.

… time and distance are the heart’s natural enemies. 

Everyone we meet, everyone we love, how we got here, what path we choose, and who we choose to remember, they are all a part of our story.

But we cannot allow the story to be written for us. Because we don’t have forever. 

Sometimes all we have is a single day.”

From Movie “The Sun is also a Star” at 1 hour 25 minute

It’s always time we run out of…

We meant to save for our retirement… We meant to stop eating so much… We meant to spend more time with our parents when they were still alive, or more time with our children when they were still little.

But we didn’t have enough time. We ran out of it.

It’s always time, not money. The richest person in the world runs out of time, just like we do.

We meant to say something to someone we cared about… but time got away from us.

We would have… we should have… we could have… But each time, we ran out of time.

…

Time is what gets us all. We run out of it. Everyone is running out of time. And it can’t be stretched. It can’t be printed. It can’t be saved up, stitched up, or revved up.

It waits for nobody and no thing. And all we are left with are regrets.

We wish we had used our time better. We wish we had begun saving for our retirement earlier. We wish we had taken the time to learn Spanish or how to play the piano…”

— Bill Bonner

Thinking about the future is a relatively rare luxury…

— Yuval Noah Harari from book “21 Lessons for the 21st century”

In a world deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain clear vision. We might not even notice the debate going on, or what the key questions are. Most of us can’t afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair; but who said history was fair?”