“Our days and our lives are pathetically shortened by miscellaneous abuses and confusions of time. We are novices at the art of making plans and have trouble remembering the plans we have made. We ignore the time that is open to us. We diminish ourselves by wishing time to pass. We are, for the most part, incapable of real concentration. Our days are broken by distraction, scrambled up into muddles of chores, errands, impulses, evasions, interruptions and delays, besotted with routine. We characteristically fail to see the ways in which a given period can be expanded, deepened and slowed by the exercise of will and awareness. Deprived of this power and isolated from continuity, we often feel small, momentary, almost transparent, like paper-thin façades of being.”

Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 20)