Far too many of us are living our lives fighting for scarp : winning that one argument, that one person, that one promotion, that one posting, that one moment – with little or no active awareness of the fact that ‘time’ is running out, this moment is just gone … just like that, not to return ever. This moment encapsulates the possibilities of both genius and the garbage, education and entertainment, sight and insight. Life is never going to be easy, but it is always going to be reasonable. We may consider whatever we have unrewarding, but it is never undeserving. Like the old saying goes, we reap what we sow. Length, breadth, height and time are the four dimensions in which we exist, most of us know our physics to know this for a fact. What is also well known is that time is linear, that we forever keep transitioning between the present and the future, we can’t go back in time, it moves in one direction that is ahead from where it is now in this moment: progressive, moving at its own pace, one moment at a time. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy the science fiction on time travel as much as any other person but until it is made possible and made available for us to use, all that we know is that we are never getting a lost moment back again to relive or experience for real.
It begs the question, what do we do with ‘time’?
What is the best use of ‘time’?
What is abundantly clear is that time is the single most valuable resource that we have and if we do not get placing it right, nothing will ever be in order. It won’t be a mindless exaggeration to say that everything that exists is an outcome of ‘time’ in one or the other form. What power is to an electronic gadget, time is to life. Colossal catastrophe will be not having a plan around ‘spending’ time. As baffling as it may sound, we have plans for everything but time; broadly, routines do exist. In the sense, the time of being out of bed, getting to work, returning for home, time to hit the bed etc. is known. Smartphones also keep us honest of the dusk and the down. But such an index is not what qualifies to be called time-plan. Please understand: it is not only about knowledge, where will one be at a given point in time and what would he/she be doing; the real question is if that ‘plan’ is the best use of time? Is there is a place better than what is planned for that time slot? Can we be doing something better than what is scheduled for an hour on a given day? Definition of what is better is different for different people. Let me give you a context for a poet, hunting his inspiration down could be a better thing to do, reading will be nicer for a writer, training for an athlete and perhaps serving people for a saint. The answer to ‘what is better’ is embedded in the purpose statement. We should keep the purpose for another day, though. Today it is about time.
Let’s imagine that all 11K of you (my regular readers) are in one giant football stadium and I asked you to raise your hand if you thought exercising is key to health and if you also think health is important. All of you would raise your hands incautiously and willingly. I would then revise the questions to instruct, those of you who do not exercise on a routine basis may drop their hands. Do you think we would have as many hands raised? If WHO reports were to be believed only about 7% people exercise regularly. So, you know how many raised hands we would have in the stadium. Out of that, if I asked, 10 people why they do not exercise knowing that it is important. 8 out of 10 would say, they do not have the ‘time’. That they lead a busy life, they have a tough job, demanding family and stubborn traffic to deal with and hence they, despite their best intentions are falling short. And if we probed further on the screen time of their phones each day, we would know that an on average all of them would be spending about 1.8 hours every day on what the authors of “Make time” calls infinite loop – social media, TV, news, YouTube, WhatsApp etc. So, is the delinquency for lack of time? Is there enough time? There certainly is… what however is not present is mindfulness.
When it comes to time, only being smart won’t help, you’ll need to be wise! Yes, I do believe that smart and wise are not the same thing and also that wise is better than smart in so many interesting many ways.
The choice is between ‘now’ and ‘later’!
All of us know how to bifurcate items between urgent and important. Think of a quadrant, which has ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ in the vertical arrangement and ‘now’ and ‘later’ in the horizontal placement; Whatever you plot for yourself in the now and the urgent block is what is the absolute better thing to do with your time. Everything else with all its bells and whistles is just sideshow – ignoring it at this moment, won’t take anything away from who you are. Let’s us not forget that time is a great leveler and an equalizer: a beggar and a billionaire, an employee and an employer; All just have 24 hours in a day, no more … no less. Another property of time is that it is unstoppable, no matter who you are, where do you come from, what you have or do not have, you just can’t stop it. Time ticks when you are happy and it also moves ahead when you are sad: at the same pace, you can’t do anything to alter it. What you can however surely do is control your response to the time that you have by accepting that whatever you wish to become, wherever you wish to reach, you will need to ride on the time that you have and it is in limited supply, for one day it is going to end for all of us and that day is not known .. so, every ticking moment is pure gold, we can’t just let it pass by undecidedly.
Let’s us start measuring our life in ‘time’, not good or bad, easy or difficult – just simple ‘time’ and see how well are we treating it. Is there a room for us to reorganize our days and our nights? Let’s us not forget if we do not handle time with grace, it will not come ease on our face. We got to ask ourselves introspective questions.
1. Are we simply going through time or are we using the time to grow into whatever we wish to become?
2. Are we learning enough while there is time?
Is ‘time’ good news for us, a relief or something unknown as we are too busy to think about?
This moment of time too shall pass, how do we make it count is the question that all of us need to find an answer to. With it, I would end this, you have a good Sunday!
Thanks for your time 🙂