“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” -Robert Louis Stevenson

Our lives are comprised of so many daily interactions. We breeze through them without much of a thought beyond the topic at hand. Due to this age of information we are so overloaded with data we take little time to process beyond the superficial. As such, our personal interactions have become more and more like our digital interactions; brief and pointless.

We reap a harvest of information but glean little of true value from any of it.

Furthermore, in our harvesting we are not planting seeds but simply spreading them along the ground in the hopes that they might sprout.

Interaction, I mean truly connecting, is a luxury that we seem to seldom afford ourselves. A good friend and I were talking the other day (and I mean truly connecting in conversation) and we had both recently began a sort of test. We began to make a conscious effort to make eye contact with whoever was talking to us. Whether just in passing or in business meetings and what we both observed is what we expected.

People lit up and engaged.

We all know this, this is not new information. But we forget it. We just need to get to the harvest and forget about planing seeds. What seeds you ask? Well, the seeds of acceptance and engagement.

The question is what are we planting in others lives?

It has been said that the eyes are the windows of the soul. When was the last time you looked into someone’s eyes while they were talking. Truly read them. We do not so much any more. In fact many of us are buried in our phones or laptops and only partially engaged, if at all.

Truly engaging with others and being present for them is a gift we give, and people are hungry for this gift. When we gift someone with our time, think about it, it is something that we will never get back. It is something we give of our life. What is more precious than this. So do we want to give it idly?

There is truly no more precious gift we give or seed we plant in another’s life.

Thomas Merton said, “Every moment and every event of every mans life on earth plants something in his soul.”

We have only so many moments to spend in this life. If we are not using them wisely and planting something that others take with them, then should we ask ourselves what we are wasting our lives on?

This may seem a harsh statement but ask others who have lived a long life what they see as the most important moments in their lives. Most, if not all, will tell you that it is the moments they invested in others or others invested in them.

We get only one life, only this moment really. We have no idea what the next moment may bring and having recently lost a few friends this is more obvious. Our time is short in the grand scheme of things.
So, what seeds are you planting? Are you investing in others, is anyone investing in you. Take some time and really consider your interactions this next week and run a little test of your own. See if investing the moments of your life, the exceedingly invaluable moments you are spending, are being spent wisely.