One of our mistakes is that we confuse life and lifetime, and construe
life to mean the span of life. In this conception the unit of measurement
is so large that our concept of life evaporates into a vague
generalization. Life is too specific, too definite for that. The quality
of life may better be measured and tested in one-hour periods of duration.
When the clock strikes nine, we know that in just sixty minutes it will
strike ten. In the space of those sixty minutes we may find a
cross-section of life. In a single hour we may experience a thousand
sensations, arrive at a thousand judgments, and make a thousand responses
to things about us. In that hour we may experience joy, sorrow, love,
hate, envy, malice, sympathy, kindliness, courage, cowardice, pettiness,
magnanimity, egoism, altruism, cruelty, mercy--a list, in fact, that
reaches on almost interminably. If we only had a spiritual cyclometer
attached to us, when the clock strikes ten we should have an interesting
moment in noting the record. Only in some such way may each one of us gain
a true notion of what his own life is. The one-hour period is quite long
enough for a determination of the spiritual attitude and disposition of
the individual.
It is no small matter to achieve life, big, full, round, abounding,
pulsating life; but it is certainly well worth striving for. Some one has
defined sin as the distance between what one is and what he might have
been; and this distance measures his decline from the sphere of life to
which he had right and title.
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