Everyone feels that time is contracting; we seem to have less and less of it. Thus, it would seem that we would rush toward selflessness, searching for a breadth of freedom. You have to be able to feel a joy in spending time with another without feeling that it costs you money to do so. As the Chinese sage Lin Yutang once said, "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live." . . . The saying alerts us to the value of being free of our own concerns, and in our time, it alerts us to the value of time freed from becoming a commodity to be bought and sold. The saying also suggests that if we cannot practice selflessness, we are not really living.
— Robert Sardello, The Power of Soul