What I’d Rather Be Doing…

It seems like everyone is so busy these days. We do it to ourselves, mostly. We fill our schedules so full that we miss out on some really meaningful, worthwhile activities and experiences.

This is my little frustrated rant to myself about the things I wish I had more time to do. The things that I really feel like I’m missing out on in life. I have been working on my MBA part-time for two years now. I probably have about one more year to go. I spend most free evenings, weekends, and even lunch breaks at work (that aren’t spent in meetings) studying and doing homework. This is a choice I made, to get an MBA. But lately, in the last few months, I’ve questioned it constantly. I am antsy and can’t wait for it to be over. I have an ache in my heart that longs for other things..

When I get my evenings and weekends back… when I don’t have to spend them working on Corporate Finance or Business Management homework, these are the things I want to do more of:

• Read more. Books currently waiting in my stack include Radical, Crazy Love, Lynchpin (I’ve read half), Terrify No More, and others.
• Cook & bake more, for the sake of being a good wife and for the fun of it. I have a growing stack of recipes that I want to try, but it takes so much time and effort to organize, coordinate with sales/coupons, and then do the actual cooking.
• Be a friendship partner to a refugee family. Help them adjust to American life, learn English, etc. I have really been wanting to do this for about a year, but don’t want to let a family down by not having the proper amount of time to commit to them.
• Volunteer more with random opportunities that arise. Be able to seize those moments when they come up.
• Commit more time to my role as a Child Ambassador with World Vision. I need to put in more effort in contacting area churches to seek out opportunities to promote child sponsorship to others.
• Spend more time developing relationships with others. Everyone seems to be too busy for each other. It is hard to coordinate quality time with most people and I think relationships suffer because of it.
• Blog more… and/or have time to do the things in my life that are worth blogging about (see some of these above).

What about you? What activities/experiences do you wish you had more time for?

Blog Action Day: We’re Talking About Water

Today, over 4,000 bloggers from 130+ countries have signed up to spark a global discussion on a very important global issue – water. It’s called Blog Action Day. (Read more about it here & find other bloggers talking about it.)

Fast Facts

• Over 1.1 billion people are without access to safe drinking water.
• Every 21 seconds, a child dies from a water-related illness.
• About 4,500 children die each day from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation facilities.
• On average, women and girls in developing countries walk 6 kilometers a day, carrying 20 liters of water, greatly reducing the time they have for other productive work or for girls to attend school.
• When a community gains access to clean water, its child mortality rate drops by half.

(Sources: World Vision, 2010 and UNICEF Children and water: global statistics, 2006)

What About Me?

• The average American uses 100+ gallons of water per day
• Millions of the world’s poorest subsist on fewer than 5 gallons per day
• It takes 53 gallons to make every latte
• The average faucet uses about 4 gallons of water per minute (brushing your teeth with it running uses about 8-12 gallons of water)
• In the US we each drink an average of 200 bottles of water per year (17 million barrels of oil are needed to produce all the plastic water bottles we use in the U.S. each year — and, shockingly, 86 percent of them will never be recycled).

Clean water is definitely something we take for granted. Most of the time we don’t even notice how much we use. This is something we must become more aware of and we must work together to do something about.

And it is easy.