A runaway calendar will keep you from simplifying your life. It holds you hostage to tangible things—meetings, appointments, and projects—without giving proper priority to the intangibles: who you are becoming, your relationships with family and friends, your connectedness to God. Without conscious intervention, this pattern of chronically overscheduling ensures that the priorities you care about most will take a backseat to the urgent priorities of others every time.

That's it?" Jason asked. "You spent an hour talking about how lucky you were to be dying?" No, not dying, Son. Living.

Everything was really a story, penned or thought or acted out at some time by someone.

Two duties belong to our souls. One is to reverently marvel. The other is humbly to endure, always taking pleasure in God. He wants us to remember that life is short and it won't be long until we clearly see, within him, all that we desire.

Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment.

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

In prayer Jesus slows us down, teaches us to count how few days we have, and gifts us with wisdom. He reveals to us that we are so caught up in what is urgent that we have overlooked what is essential. He ends our indecision and liberates us from the oppression of false deadlines and myopic vision.

Time becomes a means to an end, not moments in which to enjoy God or pay attention to others.

Learning how to die has something to do with living each day in full awareness that we are children of God, whose love is stronger than death.

Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death, as a school in the art of dying. I do not mean this in a morbid way. On the contrary, when we see life constantly relativized by death, we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift.

Then occupation is called a blessing and emptiness a curse. Many telephone conversations start with the words: "I know you are busy, but …" and we would confuse the speaker and even harm our reputation were we to say, "Oh no, I am completely free, today, tomorrow and the whole week." Our client might well lose interest in a man who has so little to do.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.