It is said that time is money. Unlike money, however, lost time cannot be recovered, and in this respect it is much more valuable than money. However, a lot of people forget this and waste their time dwelling on the past or dreaming of the future. Happy and unhappy memories of events and people pull the mind, and if one is not alert, one can get carried away by a train of thought and spend hours in the past, mentally going over inflatable water slide events and thinking of how things might have turned out if one had acted differently, or if the circumstances had been otherwise.
While one is doing this, one is disconnected from the present, unaware of the passage of time and even of the things that are happening around oneself. This experience can leave one tired, depressed or angry if one has been thinking about something that caused a lot of hurt or was otherwise emotionally intense.
One suffers the same loss of time and energy when one worries or dreams about the future. It is one thing to make plans, whereby one thinks of the steps one needs to take to accomplish a task or cope with likely events. But worrying, which usually involves thinking about how things might go wrong, doesn’t help. Fear and doubt cause worry, and the result is anxiety and a feeling of helplessness, both created by imaginary situations one has dreamed up.
At the other end of the spectrum, one might fly high, riding dreams of imagined and achievements and successes, the building castles in the air, until sobering reality brings one back to the present. In all these cases one loses precious time in the present, which is the only time when one can really act, maybe to rectify a past mistake or achieve a future goal.
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