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Our Time
Time, once its gone we can never take it back.
Thinking about this, and I mean really thinking about this one can begin to appreciate why some of us just explode or implode for no reason. We spend so much of our lives in transit from one place to the next, in the queue at the mini mart, in traffic, waiting to be served at the bank. All these things slowly steal our precious time away from us, a little here, a little there and then the day is gone and we have achieved few of the things we set out to do. The days go by a little here and little there and soon enough a year has gone by. We think back to days when we were carefree with fondness and wish we could somehow return to those times.
Or is it perhaps current perspective; at other times we cannot draw our eyes away from the clock face, it seems to be hardly moving at all, we are more responsive to the urgency to act or bed ready to act, our partner is late home from work, we are waiting for a date to arrive, we expect a phone call from a loved one.
Others speak of ‘making time’ how does one do that, by reorganising ones priorities, placing ones self ahead of some more onerous task. The time remains exactly the change is made by us.
We are so conditioned by time that a room is empty unless it has a marker of time in it, they hang upon our walls, we wear them like a chain upon our wrists, and we see it from our windows, watch it on our televisions and hear it on our streets.
We look forward to times where we can do what we enjoy most, leave the calls of our respective labours behind and do what truly pleases us, be it days spent with family or spent alone. With sadness we remember too the times when events changed our lives forever, when time took us to places we would rather not go, leaving us alone or lost in ourselves, in a well we cannot climb from.
We are born and we begin to die, yet many of us never truly live, we labour or we despair but we lose sight of the value of the time we are given, perhaps we do not even know it is there. So many of us repress ourselves to conform, we do not share our gifts with a critical world for fear of reprisal and yet we look to those who in their life time achieved so much and yet we do not think that we could ever do as much with the time we are given.
Worst of all we deny time to others by asking them to do work that we know we should be doing ourselves but don’t have the ‘time’ to do it. We make impositions on others when we secretly acknowledge they are already overburdened, we ask for an hour, a day, a month, a year, or perhaps even a lifetime and yet we are unable to give that time to them as their own, another day with a loved one or a day spent sitting on green grass.
This world has taught us that the time we have should be spent doing certain things, we go to school to learn the ways of our shifting world, we labour for many years to earn our keep and keep our own safe and sound, then we leave the order and simple structure of time behind and spend our remaining days as our own letting time do as it pleases; we have much time to ourselves but not the will or the capacity to spend it on the ventures we dreamed in youth.
Time cannot be wasted, it can only be spent: our dilemma is measuring the value in the return of our endless expenditure.
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When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you: Friedrich Nietzsche.
I live in a cemetery full of good will and integrity: Silverchair
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