THAT’S LIFE: Watch your days, they become years

Living on the clock requires us to ignore distractions, and things that put us off track. Sure, we may be temporarily stopped by an illness, an accident or an obstacle. Sometimes, it is well meaning people who are out to waste your time.

PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • Most critical things in life have timeframes.
  • You have four years to do a degree, nine months before a baby is born and a certain period before you hand in your report. Most of life, runs on a clock. You should do.

There’s a common phrase we used as teens when we were bored. “I’m just killing time,” we would say. Back then the years stretched endlessly ahead of us, and we seemed to have so much of time. Then I met a lecturer who turned that notion on it’s head. “You think you have a lot of time. But it is running out on you!” He made us watch a ticking clock for five minutes and then asked us what we observed. We got it. No matter what we did, which in our case was just sitting there our eyes glued to the wall clock, the tick toking did not stop. It just went on, one determined minute at a time. “Congratulations, you have just wasted five minutes of your life. They aren’t coming back. If anything you are five minutes closer to your death.” We laughed at his morbidity. We were young and carefree after all, and death was something that happened to old people. Sadly, within a couple of weeks we were jolted out of our reverie when two of our fellow students were killed in a car crash. Sadly, they had run out of time. I thought about those five minutes we had wasted. Would things have been different if our classmates had left five minutes earlier, or made it to the hospital with five more minutes to allow the doctors to resuscitate them? What was the value of five minutes? Five minutes that we are so happy to waste because well, it is only five minutes.

We tell a friend, “I’m five minutes away,” or our child, “Give me five minutes to finish the dishes and then we can go out and play.” We are justified because it is only five minutes and that isn’t too much to waste or postpone. Or is it? I think about that ticking clock, and how it surely and determinedly goes its way. I think about it more lately because a lot more time has passed since I was a carefree college student, and I’m more acutely aware of how fleeting life is. I think about it because I’ve seen too many friends and loved ones for whom time just ran out.

Consider this, that clock does what it is meant to do, every day, without fail. Unless it has run out of battery. Yet even when it runs out of battery, there’s still a master clock somewhere that is running on time. And guess what, once we put in new batteries, we adjust the clock’s time in keeping with the master clock. Well, most normal people do anyway. Yet that clock has more purpose than most of us. Living on the clock means being aware of what your life purpose is. What is the meaning of your existence? What are you here to do and be? When you find out, live and breathe it like that clock. Be and do your purpose, every day, even when you are asleep. Remember the clock does not stop being a clock at night.

Living on the clock requires us to ignore distractions, and things that put us off track. Sure, we may be temporarily stopped by an illness, an accident or an obstacle. Sometimes, it is well meaning people who are out to waste your time. They don’t have an agenda for their day, and are hoping to drag you along. Before you jump on that bandwagon, determine what the cost is to you. A day in your life. Hmmm. Time and by extension, life, is not wasted in big chunks. It’s the small bits that you can’t explain. Whatever the case, once we are back on our feet, we are to redeem the time, bearing in mind that it didn’t stop. We need to figure out how to get back on track, even if we are not back on time.

Living on the clock requires single minded determination. Keep time with time. Do things in the right seasons. There is a time for everything under the sun. Understand your life season, and make the most of it. Unlike weather seasons, some of life’s seasons are not on repeat. One woman who had postponed having a child to pursue her career one day found out that her time to have a biological child had run out.

Most critical things in life have timeframes. You have four years to do a degree, nine months before a baby is born and a certain period before you hand in your report. Most of life, runs on a clock. You should do.