Where does the time go? It's a question we hear almost every day, particularly at this time of year! Somehow, from mid-November onward the clock just seems to go into overdrive and before we know it, we are crawling out of bed on a freezing morning in early January unable to believe that it's another year and the holidays are over. Again.
It might have something to do with either the "time flies when you're having fun" adage or how suddenly all of our free time is taken up with dinners, parties, shopping and preparations for the festive period, or both. But in each case it seems that when we are not aware of time, either due to being buried in tasks or having a great time on holiday, the tick-tocks seem to accelerate.
Another way of looking at it might be that time passes normally when we are productively busy or having a grand old time, but it actually slows down when we are miserable or bored, to add insult to injury! You only have to think of how a typical day at work goes by when you are just in love with your job, compared to when you hate it. I don't mean that you love it because you are earning a great salary for doing very little - that's something else entirely.
So when busy in one form or another, hopefully being productive, the time just flies by. When unhappy or bored out of one's mind, it passes by slower than a garden snail. Now, the question is: in terms of not feeling that life is just passing us by and barely getting to notice it flying away, is it better to be in the camp for whom it whizzes by or the one for which every day feels like a small lifetime?
In the end it all comes down to personality, I guess. Some people do not like the hole they dug for themselves, where they never seem to get any of that "time" for themselves, and five years race by in the blink of an eye. Even though they may be superficially very successful and apparently happy, one day they hit 75-years-old and wish it could have been different. On the contrary, many people refuse early on to have life "compromised" by the over-the-top demands of a big job, settle for less, and usually earn less, but have considerably more free time. The important point of course, is what exactly do they do with that time?
That is a decision we all get to make for ourselves, and while some prefer to crash out on the sofa to watch TV for 3-4 hours, others choose to go to the gym or pursue some other interest in their life. It's often the people who apparently "have it all" or somehow manage to "do it all" that inspire us the most, even while acknowledging right away that we are not like that. But you know, the only major differences between such people and ourselves is a combination of drive and commitment.
When one is truly driven to do something or to achieve something, then that's half the battle. The commitment part requires the signing of a contract with oneself for implementation of a course of action, and then committing a portion of free time to getting a little bit of it done, and often. In fact, it seems to me that one major trait that many super-productive types have in common is a capacity to use (free) time very productively. They may agree that 5-10 pm is "free" time but would not agree that it is "dead" time. And if time does seem to race by because they are doing so many things, well, if it's borne out of passion and leads to real achievements or tangible "product" then I don't imagine that they regret it.
It is amazing how an effort of even an hour per day can begin to pile up over hundreds of days into something concrete and rewarding. It's a question of not seeing it as a loss of one's time, but rather a very satisfying use of one's time. If it's a passion, then it's use and not loss of time! In the case of writing a book, which naturally is a case that applies directly to myself, well, if I had seen struggling over the blank page as a complete loss of my time, then nothing would have ever been finished. Perhaps it might never even have been started!
The young can be forgiven for not truly appreciating their time, because they feel (understandably) that they have so much of it ahead of them. But for mature people, the completely finite quantity of time available to us in this mortal coil begins to tick-tock louder in our ears, sooner or later. We can look back at time we may have "wasted" and regret it, but that's often simply part of growing up and growing older. It's human nature to just see today as one small unit package of time, with so many still left ahead of us t that there's no need to have a crisis over it. However, the clock is still ticking, and there will be plenty of time for the sitting around later on in life, and less need for it now!
I think it's important to remember not only that it could all end tomorrow, accidentally or due to unforeseen health issues, but moreover that the 24-hour clock of single days can be distracting to some extent. Rather than seeing time clockwise in the picture at left above, it can be enlightening to think of it as an hourglass in the image on the right. The hourglass of life. The grains of sand started tumbling down from the second we were born, and we are hurtling towards the situation pictured in the first hourglass, where the last grain has fallen.
This imagery helps me to see time and life quite differently, but maybe that's just me?! So if I am sitting around tonight doing nothing, moaning about the TV choices, at 7:30 pm on the clock, well, that's okay, it's just another Tuesday evening. Right? However, if you stick my own individual hourglass of my time beside the TV and I have to stare at where the sands are, and how much remains in the top chamber vs. what is lying in the bottom one - well, that might be enough to get me screaming in panic off the warm sofa and even out at -20 Celsius to run up the icefall into the deathzone! And then back onto the computer once home again.
Time is our most precious commodity, and our human nature seems to be willing to not fuss over it due to how much of it we get, but I am pretty certain that that's not how we feel towards the end. I think the pipe and slippers by the fire will be fine for the introspection probably involved in later life, but until that time arrives, we must keep an eye on that relentless hourglass as a driving force to get us out of our funk and up from our chairs, and onto doing something productive that reflects the preciousness of our time!
As an amusing anecdote related to my own viewpoint on time, I refuse to use a classical alarm clock. There's nothing more shocking than being woken from a deep sleep by jarring bells or a digital screech on repeat, so I prefer to use my own voice. My clock comes with a mini-disc onto which I can record my own soothing, stress-free entry into the world of the living each morning - but don't worry, I haven't gone soft on myself! It usually consists of a "Boom! Come on, son, wakey wakey, shift that butt and get it out onto the deathzone, now, boy!". Even the cat jumps and runs from that one, after sniffing the clock to clarify that it's not me! ;) Kevin Mc
No comments:
Post a Comment