Time is your most precious gift.
It really is. I used to think it was health, now I realise if we don’t have time, even health is irrelevant to us.
It is poignant to me right now, as I’m sure it will be to many of you reading this – we all are very careless with our time.
We take time for granted, we abuse time, we treat it without enough care, we don’t acknowledge it enough, respect it enough, use it enough, appreciate it enough – we just don’t.
We waste time on worrying, worrying, worrying about things that might happen in the future, things that haven’t even happened. Things that we have imagined in our heads.
We waste time worrying, worrying, worrying about things that happened in the past that we CANNOT ever change.
We spend years in jobs we really dislike, jobs that leave us unhappy, unfulfilled and downright miserable.
We spend time with people we don’t really like. We waste our precious time with people that drive us mad, that we don’t connect with, that we don’t have anything in common with – people that leave us feeling drained, flat and sad.
We waste so much time doing things we actively dislike – I mean really detest – yet we waste time doing these things.
We spend hours on end in front of a screen, be it the TV, compute or phone, acting as if our lives are lived right there in the screens. This leaves us feeling isolated, inadequate, alone, miserable and sad.
We procrastinate and don’t get things done. We avoid doing so much, convincing ourselves that there is always tomorrow, and that the cutlery drawer desperately needs sorting!
We don’t listen to those we love because we are too busy. We might reply but we haven’t really listened, we can always talk to our children later or tomorrow – we have things to do.
We don’t play with our children because there are so many things to be done, but hey, we run ourselves (and them) ragged because we take them from school to club, activity to activity, no time to engage, no time to be.
We don’t take the time to cook ourselves healthy food because we think we don’t have that time to spend on our health – ready meals will do, it’s just tonight after all!
We don’t exercise as we think we don’t have the time, we work, we have families, we are so busy, no time for me and my health – that will work out just fine.
We put off doing the things we want until the time is right – it never is. Nope, NEVER!
We think we will take that wonderful trip next year, but what if next year never comes? Or we wish our time to pass so fast so we can go on that holiday to escape from our reality.
We think the present is too busy. We tell ourselves that now is not the right time, we don’t have the time. We don’t have the time to slow down, to stop, to pause, to be and we do all of this because we think we have time!
So, why are we so careless, so thoughtless with our time? An interesting thought is whether we would be so careless if our time was our money?
What if the 86,400 seconds we have each day was actually £86,400?
If we had that amount of money to spend in one day, would we happily waste that money? Would we throw it away? Would we burn it? Would we lose it? Would we spend it on something we disliked? Would we let it slip through our fingers and be gone? Would we not care because we can always have more?
Or would we spend it on doing something we loved? Would we spend it helping the people we love, on helping the communities we live in, on creating a life that we truly desire and doing the things that bring us happiness?
It’s ludicrous to suggest we would simply waste it, burn it, throw it away, yet we don’t give time the same consideration.
But don’t you agree, time is so much more valuable than money?
We can get always more money but we can never, ever get more time.
Time is priceless, it really is, and once you have lost it, you can never get it back. So let’s use our time wisely: honour it, enjoy it, respect it and make it work for us, before it runs out.
Mmmm, hard hitting I know, but sometimes we need it to be spelt out so clearly!