Time is what matters most

Lessons from Everyday Life By Theodore Lewis

Bridgman, MI-- When I was a kid growing up in Holly, Michigan, the greatest luxury for me was my dad taking me to see the Detroit Tigers at Tiger Stadium in downtown Detroit.

While a student at Adelphian Academy, my greatest luxury was being a part of Dan Shultz's Concert Band and experiencing the euphoria of a standing ovation to an encore performance in a packed EP Weaver Auditorium.

During my college years at Andrews University, my greatest luxury was visiting my parents in Madison, Tennessee and going to the Grand Ole Opry with backstage passes my father had received from Johnny Cash.

In the 1980s, I thought owning a Mercedes-Benz was the greatest luxury.  A friend at Kettering Medical Center, where I worked, had introduced me to these vehicles. I first had a 240D, then upgraded to a 300E. 

After several years of owning these vehicles, I leased a 300SE, which I thought was the ultimate luxury for me. Alas, this car had a defect in the front end, and after untold tire balancing/rotations, along with countless front-end alignments and multiple tire purchases, I turned the car in with disgust. Some luxury!

In the 1990s, I was introduced to international travel, and I thought a trip to China would be the ultimate luxury. On the last flight out of China into Hong Kong, we had a near-death experience with an almost plane crash and this brush with death removed all thoughts of travel-related luxury.

In the first decade of the new millennium, I thought I had great luxury with a beautiful new home in a conservation area near Freeport, Maine, at the height of the real estate boom in 2006. After moving to Guam a few years later, I tried to sell the home for over two years. Eventually, I was forced to sell it on a fire sale during a bruising real estate market, losing much more than my shirt. So much for that luxury.

When I moved to Guam in 2012, Clara Peterson, real estate agent extraordinaire and a wonderful friend, helped me secure a rental on the seventh floor of the Agana Beach Condominiums, with a luxurious view of sunsets over Agana Bay.  These apartments were not easy to come by and I thought I was living life's greatest luxury.  However, after a couple of typhoons and repeatedly mopping up water blown through the storm shutters by 100-mph winds, the idea of this as a luxury faded in my mind.

For several decades, I've pursued luxury on the high seas on cruise ships.  Through this experience, I have seen both luxurious and less luxurious cruises.

I am often asked if one cruise stands out above all others to me. My favorite cruises have been westbound on the Cunard transatlantic liners Queen Elizabeth 2 (now retired) and Queen Mary 2 (still active), sailing from England to New York. Cunard's transatlantic service (going nonstop between Southampton, England and New York) goes back more than a century, when the only way to travel between Europe and the U.S. was by ship. 

Cunard built liners to handle the rigorous and treacherous waters of the North Atlantic. These ships were categorized as transatlantic liners because of their design and engineering standards, which enabled them to withstand high waves and severe storm conditions. The original Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth had legendary reputations, and the world's famous and well-to-do would travel aboard them, not only to reach their destination but also to be seen along the way by the world's press.

Power plant specifications of Cunard's most recent ocean liners, the Queen Elizabeth 2 and Queen Mary 2 include the ship's speed being able to exceed 30 knots. This speed, in contrast to regular cruise ships that reach only 15-20 knots, allows the liner to travel between Southampton and New York in five to seven days without stopping.

My first transatlantic cruise was in 1992, westbound on the Queen Elizabeth 2, embarking at the port of Southampton in England and arriving six days later at Cunard’s Pier 90 on the Hudson River in New York.

Six days and five nights going westbound over 3,600 miles on the North Atlantic Ocean without stopping was a great experience for me. Since you are traveling through five time zones, the ship turns its clocks back one hour each of the five nights at 2 a.m. Therefore, on this westbound journey, one receives a 25-hour day for five consecutive days.

Wow! For five straight days, you can stay up late, go to the midnight buffet and then sleep in the next morning without missing breakfast. To me, this was a most luxurious experience.

After Sharon and I got married in 2004, we took a westbound transatlantic on the Queen Mary 2 in 2005. Sharon felt the same way I did about experiencing five 25-hour days in a row.

Now, as I think about my many years of searching for what I thought were life's greatest luxuries, enjoying a bonus hour a day for five days at sea helped me realize that the greatest luxury in life is time.

Time is a resource each of us never has enough of, yet each day we all have the same amount. Life's greatest luxury takes us from the past into the future. 

In 2025, we all had 8,760 hours. Moving forward into 2026 and beyond, we will not all have the same number of hours and days left in our lives.

So, the question for each of us at the start of this new year is: what are we going to do with the luxurious amount of precious time we have left?

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