In teaching me the way to live
It taught me how to die.

"Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard."

While I thought I have been learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

i thought i was learning to live but i was learning to die

These two experiences taught me several lessons. Lesson that I have never forgotten. I did not want to learn these lessons but I found out that it isn’t what one wants in this world that one gets. Force and might makes right. Perhaps things shouldn’t be that way but thats the way they are. I learned to look with suspicion and hatred on everybody. As the years went on that idea persisted in my mind above all others. I figured that if I was strong enough and clever enough to impose my will on others, I was right. I still believe that to this day. Another lesson I learned at that time was that there were a lot of very nice things in this world. Among them were Whisky and Sodomy. But it depended on who and how they were used. I have used plenty of both since then but I have recieved more pleasure of them since; than I did those first times. Those were the days when I was learning the lessons that life teaches us all and they made me what I am today. [sic]

Just when I thought I was learning how to live, 'twas then I realized I was learning how to die.

I’ve given myself away, the whole of me, every part.

Turning away from the computer I saw through my own narrow window (at least it opened) the green, the blue, the flashes. I looked to the clock, the screen, the window. An hour passed, then two. I looked again at the clock and saw it had been only twenty minutes. I willed the second-hand, the minute-hand, the hour-hand to move faster, to deliver me to five o'clock when I would be released as from my prison term. Then suddenly I stopped, struck by the absurdity of wishing away the only thing I've got. Eight hours, eighty years, it was all too similar. Would I wish away the years until the day of my retirement, until my time was once again my own? At work I tried to keep busy to make the hours pass quickly. It was no different when watching television, socializing, moving frenetically--there are so many ways to kill time.

I then realized that what was important was the quality of the time spent. You need to know what people need at the time they need it. These are some of the lessons I learned from that period.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.

it came to me with great force that I was wasting my life, that I was wasting it by living from day to day in a state of waiting, that I had in effect given myself up as a prisoner to this war.