An hour has passed since I thought about writing this column. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow never comes. The Rolling Stones sang a song titled “Time is on My Side.” When childhood becomes senior-hood in the blink of an eye, well, Mr. Jagger, time is on nobody’s side.

The one expression that always got me thinking was, “You’re wasting time.” We should always be doing something productive with the minutes of our day. Even sleeping is purposeful. Lounging on the beach allows us to rewind our body clocks for the next energy rush that living and working requires that we have.

So, what exactly is wasting time? Staring at the wall? Watching TV? Does doing anything other than what you’re supposed to be doing wasting time? Well, that’s not true in my book of dutiful things to do. I agree with author Marthe Troly-Curtin, who wrote, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

Now, just like anything else you might do to excess, wasting hours and hours every day can’t be good, but to be honest, I wish I had more time to waste. Like cartoonist Bill Watterson said, “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”

The other way we waste time is doing some the same thing that’s not working over and over again instead of changing course to find a better way. The baseball player will not get out of his slump unless he changes something with his hitting approach. The parents of an unruly child keep putting the kid in time out, but he still misbehaves. Someone once said, “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it to a door.”

Then we have those who say, “I don’t have time. I’m so busy. You just can’t imagine. With work and the kids with their soccer and piano lessons. I hardly have time to breathe.” Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’?”

I can hear the ultra-busy shouting to Mr. Tzu. “But I really am too busy,” and he would remind them that “Time is a created thing.” We can always reprioritize our life and include visiting Grandpa who lives alone, calling the long-lost friend we had an argument with three years ago that broke us apart.

“Too busy” is the excuse we make for the guilt we hold for when we don’t make our family and friends the top priority and when death comes upon them, we have the dreaded obligation of the visit to the funeral home that will never compensate for the visits we had missed when they were alive.

Losing the people that we love hurts. They say that time heals all wounds, but I happen to agree with the words of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, who lived 104 years and had four of her nine children die tragically before her. She said this, “I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

The clock ticks with each beat of our hearts. We live with successes, failures and regrets that add up to the sum of our experiences. Responsibilities and schedules occupy most of our time, but the hustle and bustle of the world will still offer us those precious moments where we can sit in silent introspection.

Author Sarah Dessen wrote, “There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So, you’d better learn the sound of it. Otherwise, you’ll never understand what it’s saying.”

Time grabs us by the throat. It pulls us through the day, the weeks, months, and years until we get to an old age and we say, “What just happened?” One minute I’m playing with a toy dump truck on the dirt pile behind my house. Then I’m driving my date to the high school prom. Then I’m married and have kids. I work for 38 years and I’m now here, writing this column in the twilight of my life, and I think of what Dr. Seuss said, “How did it get late so soon?”

I looked at the clock and wonder why the day is so long, but the year is so short. The hazy, lazy days of summer will flash by to October, Christmas and frozen February again.

The animals in the woods don’t care about time. The trees only know about the warm, hot, cool and cold of the seasons. They don’t count years. Don’t you wish you could stop time when you’re enjoying a moment and make it last for at least a day? Wouldn’t it be cool if every so many years, time went backward and we could live our yesterdays again with brand-new experiences?

American educator Horace Mann made a reality poster that we should tack up on a telephone pole. “LOST - yesterday, sometime between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with 60 diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.”

OK, let me stop being so depressing and look at it this way. Humans are not immortal, and that means we only have a finite amount of time to live actively. American cartoonist Bill Keane said, “Yesterday’s the past. Tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.”

Leave our yesterdays where they belong. Unwrap the present and every tomorrow will never be.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.