Time is no treasure hidden in a box that we can feel in our pocket. We cannot plunge beneath the waters and retrieve what has passed. Coins unspent, unheeded, now lie beyond retrieval. But if you can, read these words: More coins are left to you.

Imagine yourself on a large ship in the middle of the ocean. In your possession is a small box containing what’s most precious to you. Perhaps a small fortune of gold lies inside. Perhaps a single photograph of a grandmother who raised you from birth. Perhaps the box contains the crown jewel of your life’s work. Perhaps a former wedding ring.

Whatever your treasure, imagine that by some untimely movement, in one sudden and unthoughtful moment, you knock this box over the ledge. Imagine the dread, the panic, the plummeting of your heart as you watch it tumble overboard. Imagine the split-second calculation that rises to meet your impulse to jump in after it. You hear it hit the surface. You see one last glance of it before it submerges into darkness. Against hope, you hold your arm out toward the raging waves, reaching in vain as it is swallowed with no chance of recovery.

Such a loss could disturb you for the rest of your life.

What if there is another treasure, a greater treasure, that daily, weekly, moment by moment, falls over the ledge and out of sight—often without us realizing it? A treasure not held in a box, its departure we often fail to recognize, much less regret.

Treasure That Slips Away

This scene of a ship, first presented by John Foster (1770–1843), is meant to awaken us to the daily loss of time.

Time, he solemnly reminds us, is no fortune carried in a box, no valuable ring placed on one’s finger, no pearl noticeably misplaced in one’s house. The formless nature of it—unheld, unclasped, unfelt—makes it a most easy thing to waste. If only time, Foster sighs, were a physical treasure held in the hand, its loss of even a few coins would help us be more careful with the rest of it. But it isn’t.

In reflecting on the waste of time in one’s own past life, and in the lives of most other men, one has been tempted to regret that time should be infinitely remote from all relation to the senses; so that ample periods of it can pass away as unseen as a departing spirit, and as silent as death. (On the Improvement of Time, 33)

Time, one of the greatest of all our treasures, falls continually overboard, slipping silently away.

Feeling Time

What makes time so easy to waste is that many of us experience a staggering disconnect in that what we know about time is not what we often feel about time. We know it as precious; we feel it as common. Two reasons for this come to mind.

First, time feels ordinary because we assume we possess more of it than we do. In a society that aggressively seeks to distract us from the reality of death, we intuit—despite what we know—that we will live as Methuselah, who beget his first son, Lamech, at 187 years old and lived 782 years after that (Genesis 5:27). For the first half of our lives, many of us conceive old age and death standing lifetimes away. Our mind tells us to estimate a full eighty years or so; our heart tells us 900, give or take.

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