Benedict was essentially saying, “Don’t waste your life on triviality. Remember what matters. Life is fleeting and precious. Don’t squander it. Keep your death before your eyes. Hold eternity in your heart.”

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

We feel that our most important task on earth is to do something visible: to build a house, plough a field, feed cattle, or pick fruit etc., whereas it is not so important to work on something invisible, such as one’s soul; it is just as easy not to do it as to do it. And yet, it is only work of this kind – the work on your soul, so that you can be