The older I get the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Sure, as a kid I used to love getting up to watch cartoons with my dad. But nowadays, it's hard to beat a quiet, relaxing, early morning.
I know you have all heard the "3900 Marbles" story, but I think it bears repeating on this normal, typical Saturday morning:
An elderly man was talking on the radio and was reflecting on his life and his Saturday mornings, and he did a little arithmetic.
He calculated that the average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some people live more and some live less, but on average, people live about seventy-five years.
Then, he multiplied 75 times 52 and he came up with 3,900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime.
Then he got to the most poignant part.
It took him until he was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail, and by that time he had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.
It got him thinking that if he lived to be seventy-five, he only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.
So he went to a toy shop and bought every single marble they had and he ended up having to visit three toy shops to collect a 1,000 marbles. He took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container where he could see them very clearly.
Every Saturday since then, he has taken one marble out and thrown it away and he found that by watching the marbles diminish, he focused more on the really important things in life.
There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight!
Then he noticed that one Saturday morning, he took the very last marble out of the container.
He pondered and reflected that if he made it until the next Saturday then he had been given a little extra time.
Although this story has been told a million times over, I believe it is important to read these stories again and challenge ourselves. We all want a little more time, we all hope to get to the end of the jar and have another Saturday to spend with family and friends. But the real question should be how will we spend our Saturdays, how are we spending today?
Sometimes, our greatest challenge is to press our pause button so we can actually STOP, step back, and ponder, think, read, or just enjoy another cup of hot tea. Making small changes can make a BIG difference in our lives over time with a new sense of purpose and direction.
What are you going to do with the rest of this Saturday morning?
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