Good morning.
Today’s excerpt is from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
Ask yourself: what does your schedule look like today?
Does it ultimately reflect who you want to be, and how you will want to remember this stage of your life? Will it protect you from chaos and whim — a peace and haven set into the wreck of time?
Everything is composed of smaller things: civilizations of cities of families of people; Organisms of cells of molecules of atoms; lives of years of days of hours.
Spend those hours with care.