Copyright Patti Henry 2008

Your time is now. This is the only time you have actually. What you do with it will be the legacy you leave your family and this world. For, how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. 1440 time tokens a day: to speak up, to be fully alive, to have a cause, to have fun, to do what’s right, to love, to make a difference. What is your legacy? Can you say you used your time wisely? Will your children say that about you? Will those at your funeral say that about you?

I was taught as a child in Sunday School to be a good steward of the money that God gave to me. I was never taught to be a good steward of the time tokens I was given. In fact, I’ve wasted thousands of them. Thrown them away, not realizing their sacredness. How about you?

I had a client last week who was distressed about how much time he was wasting surfing the Internet. He read political blogs, he read updates on Britney Spears, he browsed for new gadgets on Amazon, he found more addictive computer games to play.

I told him about the time tokens.

Unless it’s our day to die – which it might be – we all get the same amount each day: 24 hours worth, 1440 minutes worth. They are ours to spend however we like, but however we decide to allocate them, we don’t get any extras. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

Of course, this works the same for everyone. Every single person who walks the earth. Time tokens don’t discriminate: they don’t care about your color or gender or age. They don’t care about how rich or poor you are, a president or a pauper: nothing can get you more than 1440 tokens a day. If we can only stay connected to that reality perhaps we can develop into good stewards of our tokens.

For you see, you are the gatekeeper of your tokens. You get to decide, for the most part, where they are spent. I have to tell you, I’m very picky about how I spend mine. I don’t give minutes to telemarketers. I don’t read emails I don’t want to read, or answer ones I don’t want to answer. I don’t talk to people I don’t want to or invite people I don’t like to my house. It makes me smile every time, in fact, when someone comes up to talk to me after a seminar I’ve given and ends with, "I’m sorry I’ve taken so much of your time." I smile because they haven’t taken it – I’ve consciously given it, and little do they know that if I hadn’t made the decision to hear their thoughts, they wouldn’t have even gotten one second of my time. Because it’s my time – the only time I’ve got. I am very protective of it. You can be, too.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we have control over how we spend all of our tokens. That would be nice, but life has a way of splashing itself onto us unexpectedly sometimes. Recently one of my client’s teenager was killed in a car accident. Suddenly her time was ripped away from her and she was thrown into having to be places she never would have chosen: the hospital, the funeral home, the cemetery. She, of course, is in the depths of grief right now, not in any way making conscious choices about her time because her brain is a fog. She is disconnected, numb, just trying to survive another minute or maybe two.

So, some of our life is going to be like that. I don’t know anyone who has lived any length of time who hasn’t experienced loss, trauma, or challenge of great magnitude. No one. My child of 19 has had a fairly smooth sailing life so far – but I know it’s coming. Life will drench him at some point. I see it as a good thing – because that’s when we grow and transform the most, but the control we have over our token spending at these times seems limited. Okay, so be it, thus is life.

All the more critical, then, to spend all the rest of our tokens discriminately. Carefully. On purpose.

Consider this: Mother Teresa got 1440 tokens each day. So did Jesus and Gandhi, Buddha, Krishna. Rosa Parks. Abraham Lincoln. All the great athletes that ever lived, all the great scientists, businessmen, actors, politicians, poets, Mozarts: one thousand, four hundred, and forty tokens a day. The same amount you got today. Hmmm…

How you spend your time is, of course, how you spend your life. Use your tokens to create the life you want to be living. This is your time, your legacy. If you feel like you're wasting your time surfing the net or watching mindless TV, you probably are. Reconnect to the sacredness of your tokens. May you be purposeful every moment of each day and spend them wisely.