There’s an old episode of SpongeBob, one that I remember distinctly from my childhood, where he is stuck in a place called Rock Bottom.
He’s waiting for the bus to come to take him back to Bikini Bottom but keeps getting distracted and missing it. First, he’s busy tying his shoes and the bus goes right past him. Then, he accidentally lets go of his balloon and starts chasing after it, only to have another bus zoom by. Eventually, another fish shows up that speaks a foreign language (the fish can only blow raspberries), and in the process of trying to communicate with the other fish, another bus passes by.
Fed up and frustrated, SpongeBob returns to the bus stop and says to himself, “I gotta be more diligent. I am not leaving this spot no matter what.”
The saga goes on and on. He gets distracted by a candy machine, and several other buses pass while he’s in the process of buying candy.
As a kid, I thought this was so funny; the repetition of SpongeBob missing the bus was pure humor. But as an adult, I watch this clip and see it as a metaphor for life.
Now I know what you’re thinking—it’s a kid show, don’t read too much into it. But I do think there is something to be learned from SpongeBob’s distractions.
We are so scattered, constantly chasing after the next thing, that we sometimes lose sight of what’s actually most important. We’re busy answering all sorts of texts, emails, phone calls, notifications, and so on. We run from place to place—home, work, school, gym, supermarket, and back again. Day in and day out, we figure out ways to fill up our calendar.
Yet, like SpongeBob, we let buses pass us by because we forget that getting on the bus and getting home is more important than getting candy from the candy machine across the street.
I think about all of the time I waste in a given day. Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, before I know it I’ve spent several hours out of my day doing things that I don’t really care about. The human mind isn’t wired to care about every waking second of the day. There are 86,400 seconds in a given day; we can’t expect to be perfect 86,400 times per day.
But at the very least, when we know that something important is coming (like the bus out of Rock Bottom), we should—as SpongeBob says—be a little more diligent.
Because we never know when the next bus, or the last bus, is coming.
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There’s an old episode of SpongeBob, one that I remember distinctly from my childhood, where he is stuck in a place called Rock Bottom.
He’s waiting for the bus to come to take him back to Bikini Bottom but keeps getting distracted and missing it. First, he’s busy tying his shoes and the bus goes right past him. Then, he accidentally lets go of his balloon and starts chasing after it, only to have another bus zoom by. Eventually, another fish shows up that speaks a foreign language (the fish can only blow raspberries), and in the process of trying to communicate with the other fish, another bus passes by.
Fed up and frustrated, SpongeBob returns to the bus stop and says to himself, “I gotta be more diligent. I am not leaving this spot no matter what.”
The saga goes on and on. He gets distracted by a candy machine, and several other buses pass while he’s in the process of buying candy.
As a kid, I thought this was so funny; the repetition of SpongeBob missing the bus was pure humor. But as an adult, I watch this clip and see it as a metaphor for life.
Now I know what you’re thinking—it’s a kid show, don’t read too much into it. But I do think there is something to be learned from SpongeBob’s distractions.
We are so scattered, constantly chasing after the next thing, that we sometimes lose sight of what’s actually most important. We’re busy answering all sorts of texts, emails, phone calls, notifications, and so on. We run from place to place—home, work, school, gym, supermarket, and back again. Day in and day out, we figure out ways to fill up our calendar.
Yet, like SpongeBob, we let buses pass us by because we forget that getting on the bus and getting home is more important than getting candy from the candy machine across the street.
I think about all of the time I waste in a given day. Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, before I know it I’ve spent several hours out of my day doing things that I don’t really care about. The human mind isn’t wired to care about every waking second of the day. There are 86,400 seconds in a given day; we can’t expect to be perfect 86,400 times per day.
But at the very least, when we know that something important is coming (like the bus out of Rock Bottom), we should—as SpongeBob says—be a little more diligent.
Because we never know when the next bus, or the last bus, is coming.
