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This is a particularly insightful piece of glurge, also known as "The Bank Account of Life", which I have traced back in circulation to 1967 at the earliest, thanks to Google Books and my university library. Here is the 1967 version, from Educational Horizons 46.1, entitled Time and Tide:
- If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400, that carried over no balance from day to day, allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening cancelled out whatever part of that amount you failed to use during the day, what would you do?
- Draw out every cent, of course! Well, you do have such a bank and its name is "time." Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it rules as lost whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose! It carries over no balance and allows no overdrafts. If you fail to use the day's deposit, the loss is yours. There is no going back, no drawing against tomorrow. So, invest your seconds so that they will give you the utmost in health, happiness, and success.
- AUTHOR UNKNOWN
This has been mutated, probably from the days of when you had to retype everything you wanted to forward to your friend, into such strange things as
- If you had a bank that credited $86,400 to your account each morning, carried over the [sic] balance from day to day, allowed you to keep no cash in your account at the end of 24 hours, canceled [sic] out whatever part of that amount you failed to use, what would you do? Try to spend [sic] every cent, of course! Well, everyone does have such a bank, and its name is TIME. (etc.)
Nonetheless, this does attempt to present a sort of insight into the nature of time-- although one gets the impression that the financial simile is a little strained, and in any case doesn't fully demonstrate how important each of those seconds is. For that purpose, other people have tacked on an unrelated, even less lucid piece of glurge to this one:
- To realize the value of 1 year, ask a student who has failed a final exam.
- To realize the value of 1 month, ask a patient who has been given 1 month to live.
- To realize the value of 1 week, ask an editor of a weekly publication.
- To realize the value of 1 minute, ask a person who has missed the train, bus, or plane.
- To realize the value of 1 second, ask a person who has narrowly survived an accident.
- To realize the value of 1 millisecond, ask the person who has won a silver medal to the Olympics.
For an encore, some versions finish off with this Zen adage:
- Yesterday is history.
- Tomorrow is mystery.
- Today is a gift.
- That's why it's called the "present!"
"Imagine There Is a Bank Which Credits Your Account Each Morning" is also a poem by K. Silem Mohammad.