Member-only story
I have 16,324 unread emails and I will never clear them out.
Breathe into a bag and read on.
Have you heard this story before? Your life is like an empty jar. Every day you fill it with big rocks, pebbles, and sand. The rocks are your priorities in life, the pebbles the less important things you have to do, and the grains of sand are all the time-wasting worthless indulgences. If you add too much sand and pebbles to the jar, you won’t have room for the rocks, the important stuff.
I heard this story at church (way back before the devil got to me and turned me into an atheist). Of course, the teacher didn’t tell us that we got to decide what the rocks, pebbles, and sand stood for. This part was predetermined. Obviously, the rocks were church attendance, prayer, family activities, etc. Pebbles were mowing your lawn and doing taxes. Sand was any and all entertainment and probably napping and oral sex (because you’re, like, wasting the seed).
Anyway, there are two main problems with this story for me.
First, I have a hard time prioritizing. In other words, it’s not easy to figure out what the rocks should be. Not just because it’s difficult to discover what I truly value as important, but also because there are socially acceptable priorities that are very easy to take on as my own without questioning their…
