I had to work in DC last weekend, so I took the wife with me. At the airport she had to throw away fifty dollars worth of make-up, due to my misunderstanding about TSA's latest rules. Interestingly, while two TSA agents were all over her quarter-full bottle of body lotion, they and the rest of the lot entirely missed the fact that the ticket she received at the check-in desk had someone else's name on it. Thus we confront once again the reality of tradeoffs, that by choosing to focus our attention on one thing, we human beings necessarily devote less attention to another.

It's in our nature to overlook opportunity costs. We track the observable costs of our ventures as well as the gains, we mercilessly regiment our schedules, we cram the days full of activity, and all of this drowns out the question: what might I have done if not for . . .?

In my own experience, and based on what I have gleaned from those close to the end of their lives, regret is often less about what we have done than what we have not done. I never started that bookstore. I was too afraid to tell him that I love him. I always wanted to learn piano, but never took the time. I wish I had read more poems to my little ones.

And then the time is taken from us, and we are done, and in the last days our thoughts turn not so painfully to the foolish actions as to the disastrous inactions. We grieve over our sins, but even worse, we grieve over lives not fully lived. All that time at our disposal, and this was how we spent it, on this worthless thing, and this one, and this one, and all the while what we are truly heartbroken over is not the worthless things themselves, but over what they displaced from our lives.

In "The Hungering Dark," Frederick Buechner writes:

"I suspect that the truth of it is simply that we are alive when, instead of killing time, we take time. When in the midst of our tearing around in our busy-ness trying to do something, we stop once in a while and just let ourselves be something, be who we are. When by unclenching our fists, we give life a chance to do something with us. When we take the little piece of time that we have in this world and pay attention to what it is telling us, not just to what it is telling us about the beauty of the sun as it sets, God knows, but to what it is telling us about all the wildness and strangeness and pain of things, the tears of things . . . as well as the joy of things."

So what is life speaking to you? I don't know about you, but when I listen -- truly listen -- what I hear is frightening and exhilarating, and when I don't just resume my shuffle along the sidewalk, pretending I didn't hear a thing, all the world is changed. Listening, and knowing what we give up when we choose this job and that pleasure, is a terrifying venture. What I'm learning, though, is that the alternative is far worse. So stop waiting for something, because what we all wait for is the grave, and immediately before and after it, an accounting for the time we were given.