Time, Treasure, and Talent: Three Gifts To Be Thankful For

“We paid him in gratitude and life lessons.” – Psych

But it’s what we got. 

The other day I went to McDonalds®.  This is not a usual thing, because the McDonalds® in Modern Mayberry is run and staffed by people who (really) once gave me a bare McMuffin™ instead of the Sausage McMuffin™ with Egg© that I had asked for.  Some of the folks who work there (not all of them) couldn’t spell dog if you spotted them a “d” and a “g”.

I ended up going there because The Mrs. asked if I wanted to have lunch with her and one of her relatives.  I was intended to get the food.   When I asked what she wanted, she said, “Surprise me.”   Since I like spending time with The Mrs., I agreed.  Since we never went to McDonalds™, I figured that would surprise her.

The Mrs. said to meet at noon.  Immediately the calculations went off in my mind:

• It will take me fifteen minutes to get to McDonalds®.
• It will take 10 minutes in the drive-through at McDonalds™. In Modern Mayberry, McDonalds© isn’t fast food, it’s convenient food (at least when they get the order right).
• It’s another 10 minutes to the relative’s house.

To be on time, I’d have to leave home 35 minutes before lunch.  Simple.  And, as it turned out, my timing was exactly (nearly to the minute) correct.  But my biggest revelation of the trip was this:  to feed three people a warm lunch from the drive-through cost $23.74and took 20 extra minutes from my life.

I bought lunch for the three of us (again, with me eating light) and I did the math – with the cost of my lunch deducted, each of them could have had a one pound ribeye steak and side dishes if we cooked it ourselves I and could have done that in 20 minutes or less.

Oh, sure, you say, who would want a one pound ribeye steak when one could have a box of ten lukewarm chicken McNuggets®?

Well, me.

Well, I guess McDonalds® has a pretty sophisticated social media group.

And that brought me to today’s thought.  It’s the week of Thanksgiving and I already hit gratitude, but I’m going to drive that psych-out home with this post, too.

Gratitude is being grateful for the gifts that you are given.  That implies that you use those gifts wisely.  The biggest gift is the only one that we all get right out of the box when we are born:

Time.

Time.  It’s been a subject that has fascinated me since I discovered that there are irreversible processes.  You can’t unbreak a glass.  You can’t uncrash a car.  And you can’t undo intentionally leaking all the ink from 20 or so pens on an oak hardwood floor under your bed and drawing pictures of horses when you are three.

My parents were really chapped about that last one.  Oh, they weren’t happy about the car, either.

Each of us only has so much time.  It’s both a blessing and a curse that (most of us) don’t know how much time that is.  It’s a blessing because we can face life unafraid without knowing our fate.  It’s a curse because we might waste our Time.

Literally the first item in my search for the term “time”.  I could have picked another term, but ain’t nobody got time for that.

Waste of anything we have is a failure to show gratitude.  We are each given our measure of Time.  To waste it?  You are wasting everything that your life is made of, and what you could achieve.  To be clear – your achievement isn’t for you, it’s for the future of mankind.  What are you doing with those precious moments that you have to make the future of mankind better?

Or, at least you could use your time to get on the cover of The Rolling Stone.

Even if you aren’t religious (to be clear, I am), this duty is simple – what are you doing to make the world better?

Don’t waste your Time.

The second thing that you can waste is your Treasure.  Good heavens – when I looked at the prices I paid for lukewarm McNuggets® compared to the cost of a home grilled steak dinner, it was embarrassing.  Seriously – the cost of a Quarterpounder® with Cheese™ and a medium fries was the cost of a ribeye steak.

I’m not saying that I’m only going to eat ramen noodles warmed by the heat of my thighs rubbing against each other as I spend quality time on an elliptical trainer.  Nope.  Besides, that’s much messier than keeping the ramen duct-taped under my armpits.

You really don’t want to know where I warm the pâté.

But each one of the people reading this (I’m hoping that Bezos and Musk don’t read this) have a limited amount of money.  What you do with it really matters.  Ma Wilder (who was my adopted mother) didn’t deal well with waste – to her, a wasted drop of gravy was an affront against all that was good.

And Ma Wilder was right.

“What’s the most expensive food in the world?  Food you buy and then don’t eat.” – John Wilder

But that’s also why we don’t make candles in summer – we have to pay for the heat to melt the wax and then to get the heat out of the house again.  I love having candles in the basement, but most of the year I can’t have them – who lights a candle when the air conditioning is on?

That’s the most expensive light in the world.

I’m sure someone else has said that the most expensive food in the world is the food you buy and don’t eat, since it is the most basic idea in the world.  But I haven’t seen it before, so I’ll take it until some bright commenter (Ricky?) notes that the Internet says that some French monk said it in 457 A.D.

(And, no, that won’t bother me a bit.)

But I guess that’s maybe why the French eat snails?

Well, he’s no Pinochet.  He didn’t have helicopters.

But wasting your money is wasting your time, and wasting your life.  I’m not sure about many of you, but my inheritance was the time and love I got from my parents and family.  Oh, and a box of rocks (this is true, I’ll save it for a future post, maybe).  But the Treasure you have represents potential.

There was a story I read once, I’m going from memory, and it went (more or less) like this:

A group of monks asked a Chinese Emperor for more robes.  The Emperor asked:

“What will you do with the old robes?”
“We will turn them into sheets for our beds.”
“And your old sheets?”
“We will turn them into rags to clean the floor.”
“And your old rags?”
“We will incorporate them into the bricks that make up our monastery.”

Do not waste your Treasure:  exhaust it.

The final thing you should have gratitude for?

Your Talent.

I am really grateful for each of the Talents that I have.  But, like Time and Treasure, wasting Talent is, well, wrong.  Just like Time (mostly) and Treasure (at least partially), most of the Talents you have weren’t earned, but given at birth.

What do you do with your Talents?  That’s where it gets interesting.

I have used many of my Talents during the years, and only a few of them are on display in this blog.  After all, you can’t see how shiny my scalp is over the Internet.  NASA uses it as a beacon to guide spacecraft back from orbit.

Wasting Talent is probably the worst, even more than wasting Time and Treasure.  Time is determined in many cases by forces beyond our control.  Treasure?  Treasure is fleeting.  Elon Musk made $100 billion dollars this year.  And it can evaporate as quickly as it rained.

But Talent is the most inborn of the traits, and in my opinion, the most tragic thing anyone can waste.  I can’t gain the Talent of Eddie Van Halen even if I devoted my entire life to playing the guitar.  If I spent the next decade studying the guitar, or trying to sing?  People would pay me for those talents.

Pay me not to use them.

Well, I never bought any Princess Leia CDs.

I’ll explain:  one time we went to church and I was too hoarse to sing.  The Mrs. said after that service, “I never knew how beautiful that music could be.”  This is a true story.  I guess that if people can have Talents, I can have an anti-talent, too.

In the end, I have to be grateful for the Talents that I have, and grateful for the Talents I can use.  Can I be filled with pride for them?  Nope.

So, as I sit here typing – my goal is this:

To use every Talent I have, for every minute left in my life, as much as I can.  Why?

Because a Talent is a gift.  And if I use it well, for the benefit of me and those around me in a positive way?

That is Virtue.  And that is a goal all of us can share in:  living the most virtuous lives we can.  Think of your Time, Treasure, and Talent as ways to become virtuous, because they are the greatest and, perhaps, only gifts you will ever have.

Also, don’t look up Rule 34.

So, to sum up:  I’m grateful for the Time given me, the Treasure I have earned, and the Talent I was given at birth.  These are three of the things in my life I’m most grateful for.

I’m also thankful for the Hot Mustard Sauce® from McDonalds™ on lukewarm McNuggets©.  That still tastes pretty good.

Happy Thanksgiving!