Color Your Life Happy

My best friend, Carol, frequently reminds me when I’m contemplating whether or not to take an important action, “It’s either now or later.”

What Carol means is profound and simple. She’s referring to the quandary we create about how to spend our time. There are some things we can skip doing and it won’t matter. But there are other things we must make time to do now or deal with the consequences of our nonaction later.

When our children were growing up Carol and I took them to as many free and low-cost activities as we could find such as science classes at the Museum of Science and Industry, cooking classes at the Junior Art Museum, sports camp at USC and summer music events at Hollywood Bowl.

We strongly believed that the time, money and energy we spent exposing them to as many uplifting activities and people as possible was well worth it.

We once put them in a great children’s musical group that was forming at a local Presbyterian church even though we weren’t Presbyterians. They already played violin and piano. That year learned to play handbells. What a melodious sound they made.

If one of us couldn’t transport them to an event, the other would. One summer when I was in the doctoral program and we only had one car (the one my husband drove to work) Carol did all the transporting of my kids.

Whenever someone commented that they wished they could get their kids involved but they just didn’t have time, Carol would say, “Its either now or later.”

We were not stay-at-home moms. On the contrary, we both worked full-time, and for that reason we had to manage our time well. But raising our children was our priority, so we skipped other things and made time for them.

The  time we spent overseeing homework, going to Scout meetings, promoting music practice and exposing our kids to a wide variety of uplifting activities paid off. They are all productive, balanced and loving adults.

While our children didn’t always take the paths we prefer, they did take their own paths. The time spent in building their memories and foundations can’t be unlearned. These rich experiences weave together serving as support, set point and bounce-back mechanism.

In his blog post,  “The Art of Spending Minutes to Save Hours,” Marc lists other great tips on this same concept.

There are no guarantees in life, but it seems wiser to spend the time doing what you need to do now whether it’s in raising children, building a house, starting a business, forming a personal relationship, sticking to an exercise routine or shoring up a leaky roof,  than to deal with the consequences of not having done so later.

Remember it’s either now or later.