A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, “Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?” . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time—the stuff of life.

Carl Sandburg

In my previous post, I introduced the idea of examining your life in an effort to find areas where fear may be having a very negative impact. It’s a necessary starting point for anyone who wants to make a change in their life, whether fear-related or not.

Here’s the problem: most of us, living in our fast-paced, busy, stressed-out lives, don’t have the time or mental energy to commit to really thinking about what we’re doing with our lives. It’s really a cultural phenomenon: as our lives become more and more inundated with technology along with our responsibilities, we feel greater pressure to fill every waking moment with something. Lots of people have written a great deal about this already: for example, on the glorification of busyness here, and on being overworked here (by Chuck Norris, no less), so I won’t go too much into that.