Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have)in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life;and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do,and which,indeed,you are always hoping to do when you have "more time";and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring,dazzling truth that you never will have "more time,"since you already have all the time there is--you expect me to let you into some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day,and by which,therefore,that haunting,unpleasant,daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid of!
I have found no such wonderful secret.Nor do I expect to find it,nor do Iexpect that anyone else will ever find it.It is undiscovered.When you first began to gather my drift,perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in your breast.Perhaps you said to yourself,"This man will show me an easy,unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do."Alas,no!The fact is that there is no easy way,no royal road.The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony,and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all.
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task,of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.I cannot too strongly insist on this.
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper,you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions;if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort,then do not begin.Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.