Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 101 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom.

Life is Like a Clock

Thank you for joining us for our 7 day a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. This is Day 101 of our Trek. Yesterday we came to understand that life is like working in a farm field. We need to take time to look up in gratitude, look around to help others, and then to refocus on the work at hand. Today we want to understand how life is like a clock.

In celebration of passing the milestone of our 100th Day on our Wisdom-Trek, we have a special gift that we will be giving out to 7 of our fellow trekkers to show our appreciation to our faithful team members. On October 5th, we will have a drawing in which we will be giving away 7 Wisdom-Trek t-shirts. There is an entry form on the main Base Camp page of Wisdom-Trek.com, where you can enter once per day throughout the month of September. Thank you so much for coming along with us each day on our Wisdom-Trek.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. I was able to finish cleaning the woodwork and floors in our dining room this morning, and tomorrow morning, I should be able to start applying polyurethane to the woodwork. There is a significant amount of woodwork in the dining room, so time will determine how much I am able to accomplish.

Outside the house, our newest twin fawns and their mother spent a few moments outside of our office window this morning.  Our office is on the 2nd floor with large windows. It was nice to observe them unnoticed. The fawns must be very young based on their size and the spots that are still clearly visible. The pair of hawks also graced us with some acrobatics today, which was interesting. It has been a pleasant day of work with focus both on our client work and podcasting today. We are making progress with both.

It is time, though, to break camp and head out on our Trek, and as we do, you check your clock on your phone to determine the departure time this morning. You do some quick calculations to estimate how far we will be able to travel today if everything goes according to our planned hike. It then dawns on you that life is like a clock in so many ways.

While there is a certain reality to time, the measure of time, a clock, is a man-made creation. As Albert Einstein put it, "Time is an illusion,” yet nearly every moment of our lives is controlled by the clock. The clock tells us when to get up, when to go to work, when to eat, when to go home, when to sleep, and then the cycle repeats itself each day.

As such, we need to be careful on how much we allow the clock to control us. As H. G. Wells put it, "We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery." We need to live a life that is rich and satisfying.

As we continue on our trail today, let us examine the different ways that life is like a clock. In our first analogy within the created limitations of time, man sets his own boundaries, defining his life in quarters just as a clock has its time measured in fourths. The first quarter of life is childhood, the second is young adulthood, the third mature adulthood, and the fourth is old age.

Paula and I wonder where the years have gone. We still feel like we are in the second quarter of life but realize that we are firmly entrenched in the 3rd quarter of a normal lifespan, even if God grants us the opportunity to live to 100 or longer.

Time, like life, does not stop for anyone. For this reason, each hour of your life is valuable. Other than to learn from it, you must not live in the past. You cannot change yesterday.