By Dawn Onley

Nothing is worth more than this day. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not your birthday next month. Not a future date or goal. Nothing.

Today is all we truly have – and some of us won’t even have this full day.

Many focus on money, but today is worth more than the rarest diamond, a house in Paris, or a vacation around the world. In fact, today is worth more than all of the money in the world, because today is priceless. So is tomorrow. Every day is. Time is our most valuable commodity. We can lose and regain all of the stuff that money buys, but time is the only thing that we can’t get more of.

When we come to the realization of just how important and valuable our time is, we start trying to manage it better. We start protecting it.

How are you capitalizing off of your time?

I use to spend a good chunk of the week waiting for the weekends – as if fun was relegated to two days a week. I wasn’t enjoying the beauty of a random week night.

I’m very goal-oriented, which is a nice way of saying I’m pretty good at planning my future. It is not uncommon for me to set a date to accomplish a goal. I have short-term goals and long-term goals on neat little lists that I love to check off. Earlier this year, this blog was on one of those lists. I’m always in the midst of planning something.

I think goal-planning has a lot of positive attributes. More things get done when we plan them out. It’s good to write down our goals so we stay focused on them. Goal-planning allows us to be forward-thinkers, to strategize our future. But not at the detriment of our present. We should always spend more time in the present moment than we spend anywhere else. When we are in the moment, we are not thinking, we are being.

When we view life in the moment, we don’t take a second for granted.

I’m not fully there yet, but I’m working on it. The good news is I no longer live in the past. I haven’t lived there in quite some time. I have taken the lessons from my past and have been pretty good at applying them to my present situation. This doesn’t mean I have mastered all of these lessons or that I don’t still fail from time to time, because I do. What it means is my response is different. I have grown and I respond differently than I use to.

I won’t always get to walk my baby to the park. Or read him a bedtime story.

Today is all I have. It is all we have. Make it count.