THE DAILY MIRACLE
"Yes, he's one of those men that don't know how to manage.
Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries
as well as needs. Not really extravagant. And yet the fellow's
always in difficulties. Somehow he gets nothing out of his
money. Excellent flat--half empty! Always looks as if he'd had
the brokers in. New suit--old hat! Magnificent necktie--baggy
trousers! Asks you to dinner: cut glass--bad mu
coffee--cracked cup! He can't understand it. Explanation simply
is that he fritters his income away. Wish I had the half of it!
I'd show him--"
So we have most of us criticised, at one time or another, in our
superior way.
We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer: it is the pride of
the moment. Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live
on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence
whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a
daily organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can
exist nicely in the country on L85 a year. I have seen an essay,
"How to live on eight shillings a week." But I have never seen an
essay, "How to live on twenty-four hours a day." Yet it has been
said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time
is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain
money--usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room
attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute
more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time.
It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is
possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily
miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You
wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with
twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of
your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A
highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular
as the commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And
no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no
aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is
never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no
punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you
will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious
power will say:--"This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not
deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter." It is more certain
than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays.
Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into
debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste
to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it
is kept for you.
I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it
you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the
evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective
use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling
actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness--the elusive prize
that you are all clutching for, my friends!--depends on that.
Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they
are, are not full of "How to live on a given income of time,"
instead of "How to live on a given income of money"! Money is far
commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is
just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in
gross heaps.
If one can't contrive to live on a certain income of money, one
earns a little more--or steals it, or advertises for it. One
doesn't necessarily muddle one's life because one can't quite manage
on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it
guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an
income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper
items of expenditure, one does muddle one's life definitely. The
supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say
"lives," I do not mean exists, nor "muddles through." Which of us
is free from that uneasy feeling that the "great spending
departments" of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be?
Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a
shameful hat, or that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten
the quality of the food? Which of us is not saying to himself--
which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: "I shall
alter that when I have a little more time"?
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had,
all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and
neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has
led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-
expenditure.
More
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Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a taste for literature. This is a great mistak... NOTHING IN LIFE IS HUMDRUM
Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect--in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe--in still other words, the percep... PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING
Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissa... PREFACE TO THIS EDITION
This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be, should be read at the end of the book. I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small work, and many reviews of it--some of them nearly as long as the boo... REMEMBER HUMAN NATURE
I have incidentally mentioned the vast expanse of forty-four hours between leaving business at 2 p.m. on Saturday and returning to business at 10 a.m. on Monday. And here I must touch on the point whether the week should consist of six days or of s... SERIOUS READING
Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. ... TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL
You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the adve... THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES
In order to come to grips at once with the question of time- expenditure in all its actuality, I must choose an individual case for examination. I can only deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average case, because there is no such case ... THE DAILY MIRACLE
"Yes, he's one of those men that don't know how to manage. Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries as well as needs. Not really extravagant. And yet the fellow's always in difficulties. Somehow he gets nothing out of his mone... THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE'S PROGRAMME
"But," someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything except the point, "what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day. I do all that I want to do, and still find t... THE REFLECTIVE MOOD
The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an hour a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the piano. Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one's complex organism, one has naturally to put it ...