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(…continued from last week)

Day Focused Timeframes

42 years later he was addressing the students at Yale University. Dr. Osler said that a person like himself who had been a professor at four universities, who had written a number of books, some of which were popular, that many people said to him that you must have brains of a special quality. He replied that was absolutely untrue.

He said that if you talked to many of his closest friends, you would find that in many ways he was very mediocre in character and definitely no smarter than anyone else.

What then was the secret of this great success? He said he owed it to what was called “living in day focused timeframes”. What did he mean?

A few months before he was speaking to this group at Yale, Osler had taken a voyage across the Atlantic on one of the large ocean liners at the time. He had gotten to know the captain somewhat, and the captain invited him up to the bridge.

While on the bridge, the captain was showing him all the various components of the ship, how it worked, where he gave the commands and what people did.

One of the things that Osler noticed was that there was one button that when pushed, immediately there was a clanging of bells and blowing of whistles. All the various parts of the ship were separated into water tight compartments, shut off one from the other so that each compartment could be safe from flooding. This separation of one part from the other could save the ship in times of a leak.

To the Yale medical students he said, “You are on a voyage. What I urge you to do is learn to control the machinery in your life, just as that captain did with his ship. You need to live in these day focused timeframes, similar to the water tight compartments within the ship.”

“Living within day focused timeframes is a way to ensure that you don’t get flooded from the past or from the future. You are on the bridge. You can see your goals, and you know where you are going. You’ve set a course. You are watching your compass, and you are moving ahead. And if something happens that is unexpected, it the hull is breeched, you can push the button and have the rest of the ship be safe from this flooding.”

Managing Your Ship

If you touch a button, you hear at every level of your life the iron doors shutting out the past, the dead end yesterdays. You have another one that shuts off the far distant future because it is too far away. You are safe today.

The load of tomorrow added to all of the things from your past can make anyone falter. You must live in day focused timeframes.

In his lecture, Dr. Osler did not mean to say that we do not need to focus on tomorrow or have goals. Not at all. He did say that we need to prepare for tomorrow, but we have to live and do today.

Go back to those 21 words–our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. Live in day focused timeframes.

Dr. Osler went on to say, “I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands upon thousands of grains of sand at the top of an hour glass, and they all pass slowly and evenly through the neck in the middle. Nothing you or I would do could make one grain of sand pass through the neck without impairing the hourglass.”

“You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass.”

“When we start in the morning, there are hundreds of tasks which need to be accomplished that day. But if we do not take them one at a time and let them pass slowly and evenly, even as the grains of sand pass through the narrow neck of the hourglass, then we are bound to break our own physical or mental structure.”

“I have practiced that philosophy ever since that day, and found that day focused timeframes really make my life work well. We each need to be content to live the only time we can possibly live–from right now until we fall asleep.”

Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Anyone can carry any burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work however hard, for one day. Anyone can sweetly, patiently lovingly, purely give it all they have got until the sun goes down.” This is what life is all about. We need to live in those day focused timeframes.

(to be continued…)

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