So, how do you use the 24 hours you are given each day?  Arnold Bennett, a late twentieth to early twenty-first century British author, playwright, and critic certainly has some excellent thoughts on the matter.

Arnold’s book, How To Live On 24 Hours A Day, presents his thoughts on how to do just that.  If you can get past a bit of Arnold’s twentieth century aristocratic snobbery, you will find that he has some great ideas.

Arnold’s overall thesis is this:

“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. . . 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.”

Here are some more of Bennet’s thoughts:

“Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to idleness. . .”   In other words, Bennet would argue that our spending our evenings binge watching Netflix, surfing FaceBook, or browsing YouTube is not the best use of our time.  Instead, he explains, use the time to learn how to play the guitar, learn how to code, or play a game with your kids.

“When one has thoroughly got imbued into one’s head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.”  In twenty-first century language, Bennet argues that we all need a cause, a vision.  In other words, we need to Start With Why.

And finally, my favorite:

“Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano…. By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day’s work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office—gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone!”

So, thank you for the reminder Mr. Bennet.  How are we using our days?  Are we fully using the 24 hours allotted to us or are we letting the time just simply pass?