personal development on Killing Time

In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do; it is not really the time but the will that is lacking.

In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took th...

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happ...

Our time is calibrated to a notion of efficiency that, in a single gesture, both demonizes waiting and preys on it as the opportune moment to occupy our attention.

So how can we form deep Christian convictions without dividing the church? Let’s take a deeper look at convictions themselves. Convictions are like light: they come in many colors and form across a sp...

So here I sit in the waiting room. The receptionist took my name, recorded my insurance data, and gestured a chair. “Please have a seat. We will call you when the doctor is ready.” I look around. A mo...

How time flies when you do all the talking!

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard t...

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.

Life just gives you time and space—it’s up to you to fill it.

We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ...

But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re waiting in the grocery store aisle for two minutes. We listen to podcasts on our commute. We lea...

Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it, and so diminishes eternity . . . for want of reflection, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. ...

I once gifted my husband a container of small stones on his birthday. I’m thoughtful like that. Each stone represented a month we had remaining until our children left home. While some may consider th...

And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Living 24/6 feels like magic and here’s why: it seems to defy the laws of physics, as it both slows down time and gives us more of it. I laugh a lot more on that day without screens. I notice everythi...

“It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical disguise.

This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.

Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength... It is wisdom to take occasional furlough. In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of i...

Aren't you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: "May this book, idea, cou...

“I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact ...

There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other wo...

It is life in slow motion, it’s heart in reverse, it’s hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It’s a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, lean...

Life is short, and we can accomplish only so much. Much of what we do will remain unfinished. For now. In one of my favorite short stories of all time, “Leaf by Niggle,” author J. R. R. Tolkien provid...

“If I’m not back in five minutes, just wait longer.”