How to Never Waste Time Again

 In Inner First Class

I recently attended Toastmasters Officer’s Training for my new role as Vice President of Membership of my local Toastmasters Club. During a break I bought about $35 worth of speech manuals to use for my upcoming speeches. Two weeks later, they were gone. Gone, gone, gone. I spent hours tearing my house apart looking for those manuals. I was sure I’d put them in my clutter control box, but after looking several times I assured myself they were not there.

Finally I was about to give up. My husband and I had looked high and low. Resigning myself to the fact that I would just have to suck it up and buy the manuals again, I decided half-heartedly to go through my clutter control box again. And there they were, in the bottom. Turns out the edge of the manuals is the same color as the bottom of my box. They were there the whole time, hiding in plain sight. I just didn’t dig deep enough. I made an assumption instead of being thorough, and felt that I’d wasted much time and effort looking for something that was right in front of me. In retrospect, however, in all that digging I found a lot of other things I’d been looking for and many other things that I now know where they’re hiding when I need them in the future.

It’s a fitting analogy for life. We search the world for our perfect mate only to discover we are already with them (cue the Pina Colada song) or already know them. We desperately ask God and the universe to show us what we should be doing with our life, to find out our calling, to one day find that the answer was staring us in the face for years.

This can be supremely frustrating for us. I remember hating my job and feeling down on myself for still being stuck in a position that made me unhappy. For years I looked and looked, thinking maybe it’s THIS thing…no, no….it’s THAT thing. Spinning my wheels, I wondered if I would ever find “it,” that revelation that would free from my daily frustration and bring overwhelming joy to my life.

As it turned out, I finally did have that moment after ten years of floundering. Even then it took me a year and a half to finally do something about it. But the funny thing is, all of that frustration and searching actually turned out to be the education that I needed to be able to build Everyday First Class. Every struggle was a lesson. Every moment I spent doing something that I thought was wasted time was actually a blessing to me, giving me the exact experiences I needed to be able to achieve my highest good.

With the proper perspective, no experience is wasted time. There is education in every minute if we would just dig a little deeper and not assume that our frustration is for nothing. Each traffic jam, long line and boring meeting has something to teach us. Once we uncover this buried treasure we will never waste another moment again.0

Recommended Posts

Leave a Comment