“Time is our most precious resource, but very few of us use it as wisely as we could. We rush around so much that sometimes we forget to actually live.”
—Maria
The subject line of the email was “An Omen from God.”
It was from my brother Bobby, who was in Morocco for a board meeting of the organizations ONE and (RED), which he co-founded with Bono—organizations that save lives around the world. Saving lives has, in fact, been my brother’s life’s work. It has actually been the life’s work of all of my brothers—Timothy as chairman of the Special Olympics International, Mark as president of the Save the Children Action Network, and Anthony as the founder and chairman of Best Buddies. But this story is about Bobby.
Bobby has devoted his life to working on behalf of others. That’s why an exchange he had with a doorman in Morocco stopped him cold in his tracks.
The doorman, who was trying to grab my impatient and restless brother a cab, turned to him and said, “We have time here. Not like you in America. In America, you have no time, so you do not live.”
This really made my brother stop (a huge feat, by the way), and that was the message he was sharing with me in his email. “You’re so busy, you leave no time to live. Make your time yours,” he wrote to me from halfway around the world.
Now I’m turning around and sharing that with you, too, because I believe it to be deeply true. Time is our most precious resource, but very few of us use it as wisely as we should. We rush through our lives with our eyes on our phones, trying to get through one thing after another. We rush around trying to get somewhere that we think will make us happy. We rush around so much that in the midst of it all, we forget to actually live.
Do you make time to live? Time for yourself? Time for your friends? Time for your family? Or are you too busy?
Many months before I got that email, my brother Timothy had asked me to spend some time with him. “Give me a weekend,” he said. “I want time with you.” I called him up and said, “Yes, let’s,” and we did. (I’ll tell you all about it later in this book.)
I hope you’ll take some time to decide whether you’re so busy with everything else in your life that you’ve forgotten those closest to you—forgotten maybe even yourself.
Which brings me back to my brother Bobby. Recently he moved away from Los Angeles, where he lived for more than twenty years. He packed up his life and his family and left to settle in another state.
At first, I was angry, because I felt like he was leaving me behind. I know that sounds selfish, but that’s exactly how I took it at first. Then I came to realize that what Bobby needed was time. Time away from LA, time for himself and his family, time to breathe, time to recalibrate. Time, perhaps, to savor the life he had skipped over for so long while working so hard on behalf of others. I pray that in his new home he finds the time to live the life he is seeking.
All of which brings me to my favorite poem by my friend Mary Oliver. It’s called “The Journey,” and in it she reminds us that there’s only one life you can save, and that’s your own. So start there. If you have time for something else after that, go for it. But make what you do with your time matter. You have only so much time here on earth. Make it meaningful.
As the Moroccan doorman taught Bobby: Take the time to live.
Dear God, when I read this poem by Mary Oliver, I felt like it was an omen from you to me. Thank you.
THE JOURNEY
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations –
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
—Mary Oliver, from Dream Work