Commentary: There is a thief that comes into everyone’s bedroom every evening. He never misses a single night. He comes into your room at the end of each and every day. You don’t notice him because he slips in so quietly and never makes a sound as he does his work. When you wake up the next morning, you hardly even notice that anything valuable is gone. But something was taken, something precious. He’s taken something from you that you cannot buy and something you can’t put a price on. After a while, some of us begin to notice him. We desperately want to guard against his thieving ways. But we still can’t stop him even when we know he’s coming. It is so natural for him to steal that he does so effortlessly and without any regret or remorse. He steals without feeling. And he’s done it for more years than anyone can count.
As a thief, you wonder if he ever feels he’s taken enough. It doesn’t seem fair that he steals from you every single night of every single day. How can he keep doing this? But he does. And it gets worse. He steals from everyone you know and everyone you don’t know. In fact, in all of human history there has never been a single person that he hasn’t stolen from.
He steals as much from the rich as he steals from the poor. He steals from the most powerful in our world and he steals from the most needy. He steals equally from men and women. He steals from older folks and he steals from the young. There is no place you can hide from him. There is no insurance policy that will protect you. There is no app that can protect you. There is no support group that can assist you. He is so good as what he does, he even steals from all other thieves!
Who is this master thief? Who is this mighty taker that makes all other thieves look like sad amateurs? This thief is the Endless March of Time, the ceaseless passages of days.
He slips into your bedroom at the end of each day. When his work is done, you realize that something is gone and he’s stolen away another one of your precious days. You only get so many of these that are gifted to you and you literally want to guard them with your life. But he comes and takes them anyway. It all seems so unfair.
Is there nothing we can do about this? We’re powerless to stop him. We can’t even slow him down. But there is something that all of us can do to mitigate this eternal thieving master and this affront to our sensibilities.
We can empty out each day before he gets to us. We can live every day to the fullest and use it up so when he comes calling there’s nothing left of it that we haven’t already used. We can quit obsessing about political soap opera that will never end or reality television or putting out a good facade on social media or tolerating daily nonsense or stressing too much about things that don’t deserve our time and energy.
We can do every single thing we need and want to on that day. We can live out some of our hopes and dreams. We can share ourselves with others in every way possible. We can learn new things and gain insights by reflecting on our already lived moments. We can have some experiences we’ve never had so we can know and live out something different from yesterday. We can show more thanks and gratitude to the Great Giver of Life than we ever have before to show our deepest appreciation for being here.
When you think of all the circumstances that had to happen just one certain way for you to get here, your mind cannot conceive it. It is beyond the understanding of the human mind. First, your two parents had to get together. That’s a big job in itself. But they would not be here were it not for two other sets of parents who had to get together. Now you’re up to four people. But those four people would not be here were it not for two more sets of parents to create them. Now you’re already up to eight people and you’ve only gone back a few decades in time. This truly boggles the mind. It took all these people and countless more to help get you here. And this says nothing about all the uncountable specific life circumstances that had to come together in your own life like such as being at this certain place and not all those other places. Or choosing this career and not all these other ones. Or succeeding at this thing and not that thing. Or being with this person and not that person or with no person at all.
But we weren’t put here to know all these uncountable and incomprehensible steps that just fell into the right place that got us all here at this place and at this point in time. That’s not our job.
We have one single job. We were brought here to enjoy, use up, and empty out every single day of our lives to the absolute fullest before that Nasty Master Thief pays us his nightly visit. Yes, he may leave with another one of our precious days. But we get to keep all the contents of those previous twenty-four hours for ourselves and he gets none of them if we did things right.
Health care professionals and researchers question people who are close to the end of the their days about these elders regret. The answers most given are not doing things they wanted to, not traveling enough, and not spending enough time with the people they care about. You can be sure that in future years when this question is asked, people will not say I wish I had spent more time on social media, or I wish I had argued politics more, or I wish I had spent more time doing things all day that just wasted my time.
The worst thing we can do is let The Thief leave at night with some of our hours unused or wasted or and not fully lived. When we let that happen, we become thieves just like him, too. We stole something precious away from our own self and tossed it away. How do we get those hours back? We can’t. They’re gone forever. And forever is a really long time. A really long time. Forever.
One of the great spiritual admonitions of the ages is that we are not to steal. That means we are not to steal from ourselves, either. That other thief? Put on a smile at the end of your day, lay your head down on your pillow, reflect on everything you did, and let him leave with a big empty bag of nothing!