'If you can fill the unforgiving minute, With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it' from If by Rudyard Kipling, renowned Poet and Author who credited the inception of his writing career to the bullying he received as a child
How has life been treating you, or how have you been treating life? We have been travelling, properly away from home for over a month.
As you will know, a journey involves not just your feet, a car or a plane but your experience of the road you travel, the people you travel with and those you meet along the way. In many ways your journey makes you. Your arrival simply confirms what you have become.
During our journey, we spent hour upon hour on airports, in planes and in our car as our family of five travelled from the South West tip of England to California, back home and then right down to the South of France and the border it shares with Spain.
On our final journey home, we experienced another in a series of increasingly frustrating pauses to our progress as we waited to board a delayed train. Have you ever noticed that waiting becomes worse when you have no information about how long you will be waiting for? Or when you are tired, or you seem to be making no progress or you have no control over the events surrounding you?
A Polish man we were waiting with had this to say 'it's OK, on a long journey you can expect some delays.' The thought struck me that sometimes we are so eager to get to our destination, we forget what can happen along the way. Those slow times, those dead times, those times when we have to make the most of what we have now.
The French word for wait is 'attendre', from which we get the English word 'attend' - to be present at, to show up, to look after, to take care of.
So make the most of the unforgiving minute. Every chip that is taken out of an uncut diamond reveals its beauty. Choose today in favour of what might have been or what you don't see yet. Nothing goes to waste when it's all you have.
'Wait and hope for and expect the Lord; be brave and of good courage and let your heart be stout and enduring. Yes, wait for and hope for and expect the Lord.' Psalm 27 v14, Amplified Bible
Good writing should be unforgettable. Claire Vorster is an inspirational writer with 20 years professional experience, both in the US and the UK. She specializes in persuasive, motivational writing for clients from Compassion US to Microsoft plus many online markets.
When It Hurts Like Hell – Heaven Is Here, by Claire, is available to Nook and iBooks now.