Saving Ourselves

There is much emphasis these days on “saving” ourselves, at least in a mental and physical sense. Blessedly, we have machines that do the work of millions of men from the moving of mountains to the most meticulous of technical details; machines that even make “decisions,” and paradoxically, do more work more uniformly than the men who make them. And so the days and hours of labor have been shortened, and time in a sense has been “saved.”

But with all this “saving” of time and of effort and of human energy, it appears that people are not always quite sure what it is that they are “saving” themselves for. Some people “save” themselves simply to sit. Some work hard at pursuing pleasures and pastimes (and some men make money by helping other men spend the leisure time that labor-saving machines have saved.) And some perhaps work harder at play than they work at their work. (And in this they are not so different from children, who will work exceedingly hard at play, but who would pout and plead fatigue and feel imposed upon if someone should assign them to the self-same task.)

Time cannot be hoarded. Life cannot be hoarded. It is only good for what we use it for. And we deceive ourselves if we seek too much to “save” ourselves by simply sitting or simply seeking to amuse ourselves. The only way to “save” time, to “save” life⎯the only way to put it into “storage” so to speak⎯is to convert it into accomplishment: into work done, into things made and improved, into talents developed, into service given, into knowledge and understanding acquired, and lives lifted in the cause of truth and human happiness.

As surely as we live, the law of compensation will enter in. As surely as we live, we shall be richly rewarded for exceeding the minimum required amount. Life is going to pass; time is going to pass into eternity no matter what we do with it or fail to do with it. And “whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose [or use] his life . . . shall find it.”