Time has a strange way of slipping past you if you let it. More stealth like than our most highly experienced Special Forces, more silent and deadly than a trained ninja; time can creep up on you and take you by surprise. One moment you are riffling through your parka pockets, searching for a few spare coins in amongst sweet wrappers and Air-fix soldiers to buy a quarter of pear drops or cola cubes, the next you are pleading with your bank manager for another extension on your already overdue mortgage.
The last couple of months have passed me by in the blink of an eye. It seems I fell asleep one night in September and awoke late October. At some point during the night a mystical unseen force stole my time away from me. We are all guilty of wishing the hours and days away, how often have you sat at your office desk or at your work place and wished for the end of your working day, wished it was the weekend already? Time is a precious commodity of which we can never replace, once it is gone, once that minute on the 17th day of the 3rd month in the year 2009 has gone it can never come back. We are all given an unknown amount of precious time to spend on this earth and yet we frivolously discard it often without thought or regard, much like we blink or breathe without consciously thinking about it we let the sands of time slip through the hour glass without any real contemplation.
We far too easily slip into the mundane routine of life. We work, we come home to kith and kin, we maybe go out on our days off and before we know it we are back at work again. Days merge into weeks, weeks into months and months into years. Before too long we wake up one morning, look in the mirror and see an old stranger staring back at us. The saying live every day as if it were your last is all well and good albeit slightly unpractical, we all have bills to pay and, unless you are the latest lottery winner that requires us spending a vast majority of our precious time at work. So maybe we cannot live every day as if it was our last but the time we do have we should make the most of. When you are not at work, if you have family be with them, spend time with them for all too soon the young children in your life will have their own mundane routine of life and there minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years will be speeding past them.
When you are younger time seems to be a vast expanse that you never seem to progress across, as if time were an ocean and you are in a row boat tethered to the shore. Everything took forever, from the car journey on a day out, to your birthday, to the next Christmas. It all seemed like such a long time, at the time. Now car journeys are fleeting moments your sub conscious sometimes doesn’t even register, birthdays become just another reminder that yet another year has slipped past you and as Christmas all too soon approaches you feel as if it was just last week you put the tinsel and decorations in boxes back into the loft. Afternoons spent playing in the sun with your friends seemed to last a life time, every day was an adventure, every second an exploration into the unknown. Never really knowing what was round the corner we lived life without an expectation of tomorrow, we lived for the moment. Now as we have settled into the routine we know all too well what tomorrow brings. We know what we are doing a week on Saturday, our life is planned out for us and for the most part it isn’t something new and exciting, it is something we have done many times before. In our youth we didn’t always know what the plans were, or if we did we didn’t know what they held in store for us. Everything was a surprise waiting to be unwrapped. The anticipation of the unknown caused time to slow and enabled us, had we have known better, to cherish it. Now with the knowledge we have gained and the routine we live time hurries past us in a blur. Every now and then we need to stop, turn the hour glass on its side and savour the time given to us. Try to break free from the chains of modern day to day existence and experience new things. Do something you have never done before. Go somewhere you have never gone before. With modern transportation as good as it is there is nothing really stopping you from going anywhere. Even on a meagre budget I am certain there are places on your door step you have never been to that would not cost the earth. If you try it is not hard to find the time to do all those things you want to do, yes it may require some initial effort but it will be so worthwhile. I want to get to the end of my allotted time with as few if onlys and what ifs as possible. I don’t want to find myself saying if only I had more time.
Get up out of your arm chair and find the world outside your front door; it is just sitting there waiting for you to explore it.
Make the most of the time you are given, you never know when that last grain of sand will fall.
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