The days are but a handful

As I sit reading a book or composing this blog I have the uneasy fear at the back of my mind I should be doing something else, something more conventionally productive, like cutting the lawn of painting the bedroom. Why is this ? 
Our lives for the most part are at the behest of others. If married, our wife's have a plan for today and you often seem to play a large part in effecting the plan. If in the workplace we are part of the bosses plan, as he is for his boss we are therefore only a proverbial cog in the mechanism.
Time, the hours in a day at which we can be productive is no different from the time we have when we are retired from paid work and yet the time, or the days seem to fly in a way which they didn't when we were working.
Perhaps working to someone else's plan places one in a continuum, "a sequence where the adjacent elements are not perceptibly different to each other". It is this continuous sequence, each day merging into the other that makes time stand still with only the weekend standing out as an event to set aside.
When retired there is no continuum, little planning and only time to fill. Of course the lawn needs cutting and the house needs maintaining but the pressure from outside (other than ones wife) is not there and we can see perhaps for the first time the minutes tick by in a day, a week, a year, our time on earth is finite and we are at the wrong end of the sequence. We have squandered the years on the assumption that there is more to come but when you are down to your last four maybe five, relatively healthy years then the days are but a handful.         

http://twocents2012.blogspot.com.au/