YOU and I have heard of the oft-quoted saying, “Life is short.” The quotation is so short that it calls for an added idea.
Karl Marx had one: “Life is too short to be anything but happy.”
I like this one from Hollywood actor Viggo Motensen: “Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, the shorter it is. People lose their capacity to walk, run, travel, think, and experience life. I realize how important it is to use the time I have.”
And because life is short, another famous quotation says, “Time is gold.” Gold stands for wealth that anybody may amass through wise use of time. It not only enables us to buy things; it also gives us freedom to spend time as we want.
We wonder why some people make so much of it in the shortest time while most people spend so much time for a little gold. The ability of the rich to expand their material wealth in the shortest time amazes employees who work eight hours a day for sheer survival.
We know of hard-working lawyers and doctors who make hundreds of thousands of pesos a month but don’t have enough time to accommodate all their clients and patients, respectively.
There are those who, for lack of sufficient patients of clients, do not make enough money to maintain a decent lifestyle.
Burke Hedges, an American book author, wrote, “People who are locked into their jobs are victims of income creation, not wealth creation.
“With income creation, you trade time for money, which means you don’t earn the money until you personally do the work.
“Unfortunately, income creation is an endless treadmill. When the treadmill stops, workers who fall victims to illness, injury, layoff or burnout are incomeless.
“Where would the highly paid doctor be if he developed arthritis in his hands and could no longer create income because he had to stop working? If you don’t have any income other than income from your job, you’re heading for disaster.”
This explains why the so-called urban poor who receive no regular monthly income squat on other people’s real estate.
Economic inequality persists even in the United States, the supposed land of milk and honey, where the average worker toils in the first half of his lifetime to purchase a home and accumulate some savings, but takes only six months of unemployment to lose it all.
With a worse scenario here in the Philippines where even the middle-class lack sustainable monthly pay, the more creative ones strive for an income that does not rely on trading time for money.
Take for example the case of my cousin Elbert. While still a high school student at Sibalom Academy in Sibalom, Antique, he sold die-cast miniature jeepneys to tourists. He prospered from that business and retired. All his children have finished college.
“I enjoy life,” he told me. “I don’t have to be a Henry Sy to sleep on a comfortable bed. I eat the food that Lucio Tan and John Gokongwei eat. I also travel where I want. It’s okay that they have more of everything. Who knows? They probably have more problems than I have.”
Rich or poor, we all have 24 hours a day. At the end of the day, we will all go down in history. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
