We’ve been having a discussion at my house lately about the many ways we spend our time. My husband has been listening to a lot of audio books on his commute and he mentioned something that hit him hard about his most recent of how the man he was learning about didn’t waste a lot of time. The man was Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the world. I would add possibly the most generous man too.

So we’ve been reviewing how we spend our time at my house. We’ve been pretty careful about TV consumption. My husband and I record a few of our favorite series and watch them after the kids have gone to bed. We learned when our daughter was not quite two that we quickly became bad parents with no patience and raised voices if we tried to watch something we wanted while she was awake and needing mom and dad. We’ve also monitored more of what comes into the home by recording shows for the kids to watch nearly eliminating live TV. Not only does this help us filter what comes in, it also helps us track the time spent. So on the level of what we watch and how, I feel great. But even with all this I can’t deny that we still spend a lot of free time watching TV. With new series beginning the fall we picked up Bionic Woman and Journeyman to our Heroes and Office line up. So we just doubled the time we’ll spend watching TV after the kids have gone to bed. And the TV is such a great babysitter for mom to get some work done that the kids spend far too much time in front of it. It’s not that what we’re doing with our time is bad…given the shows and time spent together you could even classify it as good. But it’s undeniably not the better or best use of our precious time.

So we’re contemplating shutting off the TV service. We’d still have movies and some of the kid’s shows on DVD so it wouldn’t be like removing TV entirely but it certainly would make a dent in our use of it.

My husband said something that struck me last night. He reminded me of our early days of trying to conceive and how we’d used the logic that we’d never want to look back and be able to say “what if” we had tried something. What if taking a simple pill would have resulted in a pregnancy? Could we live with that haunting unknown? Now we can look back with peace of mind, now we know. He used the same logic for our current discussion saying how much worse it will be if years down the road we look back and say “What if” we had spent more time doing “x” instead of watching TV. There will be a much greater ache if there are things that could have been achieved, morals that could have been strengthened, character that could have been defined and knowledge that could have been gained with a little more effort on our part to spend more time with meaningful activities and recreation. Although I might initially miss the characters and story lines of some of my favorite shows, they won’t miss me. In fact, they won’t even notice my absence. Isn’t that saying something?

I don’t want to look back on my life and see a lot of good decisions but multiple missed opportunities because they weren’t the better or best decisions. Your thoughts?

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