| Life Is Short--Don't Miss A MINUTE Of It!! By Donna Krech |
Sitting in my kitchen, on the desk by the far wall, is a large glass bowl. Truth be known, it's actually a punch bowl. It takes up nearly half the desktop! In it resides so many marbles that they nearly touch the rim of the bowl, at least for today anyway. You see, these marbles represent the weekends of my life, or as a story I once heard says, my Saturday's.
Due to a very painful situation I was living through, I realized several months ago that I was hanging on to way too much heartbreak. I decided life is short and I didn't want to waste it with worry and fear and stress. I didn't want to spend time on things that weren't going to make a positive difference in the world- including mine. I then remembered a story I'd read by Jeffrey Davis. The following is a reflection of that story.
The setting was back during a time when listening to and broadcasting with ham-radios (amateur radio) was a very popular pastime. The narrator of the story got up on a Saturday morning, poured himself a hot cup of coffee, grabbed the morning paper and headed to his basement 'ham-shack'. He turned on the radio and came across a conversation between and older sounding man and a younger sounding one. The older gentleman had a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. The narrator listened as he told the younger man something about "a thousand marbles."
"Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you're busy with your job. I'm sure they pay you well but it's a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet and not be able to be home to tuck your children into bed or attend the softball games. Too bad you missed your daughter's dance recital." He continued, "Let me tell you something Tom, something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities."
"You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives to be about seventy-five old. (This is still accurate by the way. The average woman lives to be about 77 and the average man to 73.) Well, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime."
"That's pretty exciting, but what wasn't so wonderful is that I didn't figure this out until I was fifty-five years old! And by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and... Click here to continue. |
My struggle with weight loss began after graduating from high school. I went on a crash diet and before I knew it, I was barely eating anything at all. I kept cutting back on calories and was scared of gaining weight. My weight plummeted to below 100 lbs and I was hospitalized and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and depression. After a long road, I recovered and gained weight but on the inside I was still suffering with weight related issues. I would starve myself one day and binge the next. 
