“Regret for wasted time is more wasted time
“Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.” - Mason Cooley was a renowned American aphorist who was known for creating intelligent and witty aphorisms.
— from Time
In the book
Seneca cut to the bone: it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste so much of it. And here is the cruel trap waiting on the far side of waste — regret for wasted time is itself more wasted time. We spend inordinate stretches of our lives staring into the rearview mirror, replaying what is already behind us, burning present hours grieving past ones. […] It will not warn you, so you must be the one who stays awake to it — not anxiously, not morbidly, but tenderly, the way you would treasure anything you knew you could not keep. Do not waste your hours, and do not then waste more of them grieving the ones you wasted; regret for lost time is only more lost time, and the cure is always the same — to spend the next hour well. The single most useful thing I know about a whole life is the saying that the time is always ripe to do what is right; whatever you have been putting off — the apology, the visit, the beginning — the right hour is the one you are in. — Time