“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

Source: The Writing Life

Source: " The Writing Life http://www.tikkun.org/mediagallery/download.php?mid=20090505114218282" (link is to PDF download), Tikkun magazine, Volume 3, Number 6, 1988

Variant: Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?
Source: Fighting Ruben Wolfe

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 173.

On various concerns about writing his song "The Veil", and reactions to it.
Beating the drums of hope and faith (2004)
Context: We spend so much time defending the Qur’an from attacks that it’s sexist, we rant and rave about how Islam gave rights to women over 1400 years ago, but our sisters are still not in position of leadership within our community. Our sisters are still praying next to the shoe-racks while the men have plush carpets beneath their lazy foreheads and our public women’s shelters are full of Muslim women fleeing from abusive husbands and dead-beat dads. The sad reality is that our community does display sexist attitudes to women. Writing a song about Hijab seemed pretty shallow to me in light of the other issues surrounding women that we Muslims are too self-righteous to face. … I began to see that some Muslim women look down on others for not covering, or that many Muslim men judge sisters who wear hijab differently from those who don’t. A sister shows up at the mosque one day without hijab and she is treated rudely; she shows up the next day with hijab and she is treated like a queen. Such a scenario is a blatant treatment of the woman as an object, no different than the judgements we see made in secular society of women’s appearances. In the end, it is not about the piece of cloth. It is about the relationship with God, and I know I don’t want anybody judging me so I don’t think it is right for us to judge each other.

Source: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Variant: Raven: So Alexander, now we know what we do all day. What do you do?
Alexander: I spend it thinking about you.
Source: Love Bites

September 27, 2005 http://news.bostonherald.com/international/view.bg?articleid=104361&format=text

Source: Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (2005), p. 262