Life and Grocery Shopping

 Life is a gamble--will you stake everything on one big dream, or spread yourself out over several small dreams?



Dear Ysak, 

Do you remember the occasions when your mother and I would take you along to the supermarket, where you would ride a car-shaped shopping cart while we go around picking stuff for the house? It's called grocery shopping, and we do that every month to stock-up on food and other things that we need around the house.

Grocery shopping is a balancing act for your mother and I. We walk into the supermarket with a set budget and a list of what we need. And then, along the way, we make decisions on whether to spend more on one item and less on another, or to just spread the money evenly. There are trade-offs to each decision. A pack of better-tasting cookies, for example, would cost more than average-tasting (but good, just the same) ones. But in the end, the important thing is that when we leave the supermarket, we have everything we need in the house for the coming month.

Life is a lot like grocery shopping. Only, instead of money, we budget our time on earth. As children, we often write down a list of the things we want to do and achieve in our lives. As human beings, we all have a fixed number of years to live on this earth. Some of us have many years, others have few. But either way, what matters is how we spend those years in achieving the things we want to achieve. Are you going to spend all of your years going after one dream? Or will you spread your time evenly to be able to do several things with your life?

Don't forget that there are trade-offs. Sometimes, in order to achieve one goal, you have to go all-out for it. This is like going into a supermarket and spending all of your money on the most expensive, best-tasting cookies in the store. The danger here is that once you've eaten all of those cookies, you'll have nothing else left to eat. On the other hand, there is also some good in dividing your time and spending a little on each of several goals. This is like the way your mother and I normally do our grocery shopping, where we spread out the budget to be able to buy everything we need. You may not go home with the best-tasting cookies in the store, but you still have everything you need.

As you go through life, be smart with how you budget your time on earth. Go ahead and spend more on the things that you think are worth it, but always make sure that you have everything you need.