I recently learned how jewelers handle the scraps and dust from the precious metals and stones they work with. How they sweep their workspace, clean their clothes, and collect as much as they can of the gold dust and diamond shards in their shops. There are a number of different ways they extract the different metals, but it is worth the effort. They can reuse some scraps, but mostly they can exchange the gold dust for money.
There is even a story of a person buying a floor mat from a jewelry workshop then made a thousand dollars by cleaning and collecting the scraps and dust from it. (Might be an urban legend. I could not verify the story, but many articles referenced the story.)
As I listened about this process (and then researched it), an idea came to mind…
Do we live our lives as if it is as valuable as gold dust?
Let’s see if I can connect these dots to highlight the importance of this question.
First, our lives are filled with big moments, like a piece of jewelry, a diamond ring, or gold necklace. We value those moments just like we value the jewelry. But what about all the small bits of our life, the small amounts of time? Time in the car, waiting for the oven to preheat, the last five minutes of class?
How valuable is that time for you? If it was gold dust you would take the time and energy to collect it, to save it. Jewelers spend a lot of energy collecting these small scraps from their work. But what do you do with yours? What do I do with mine? Do I check my phone, play some match-3 game while ignoring people around me? I have. Even with my daughters sitting next to me. So instead of talking, or having Attitude T-rex show up (dad thing… hard to explain), I waste eight minutes waiting till the oven beeps, indicating it is now 400 degrees.
Here’s the other dot, and maybe the most important aspect of my thoughts… a jeweler collects the smallest particles, saves them until there is enough to exchange the dust for money or uses the different scraps later for another piece of jewelry.
The smallest moments of our lives work the same way. What does playing a match-3 game do for me later, beside leveling up? For most of the time we spend on our phones, what do we get from it? Seriously? If we spend the small amounts of time talking, thinking, drawing, something, anything more human oriented, we build quality into our lives. We build better relationships, create depth and meaning in our lives.
What would life be like if we treated our time as if it was gold dust?
It is all Connected 