I recently finished a novel by Mitch Albom. Yeah, you guessed it right – The Timekeeper. It’s the first book I finished by the author. I have read one of his books before but didn’t have the chance to finish it because I just borrowed the book. Anyways.. The book talked about time and how people treats it.

The book is really a must read. It doesn’t just have a great plot, it’s a book of wisdom. You’d fall in love with the story, yes. But what’s nice with the book is that you get to think after you finish it. For me, the experience was overwhelming, really. I actually wrote a lot of thoughts in my notebook after I read it. In case you don’t know me, when thoughts get stuck in my head, I write them down so they could leave my brain. Yeah, that’s how I roll. Grab my notebook, see what I’m doodling and tadaaa, you’ve read my mind. haha. Anyways, let’s get to the point of this post.. 🙂

See, time goes on and on. It’s something that’s when spent, is spent. No turning back, no rewinds – at least not in real life. Some of us wants an infinity of it, others just doesn’t want more of it. The thing is, no one owns our own time but ourselves. It’s just that the give-and-spend happens so fast. It’s very difficult to talk about time without actually giving words associated with it. Fast is a word which we associate with time. Just bear with me here. Just think of it this way, we are given peso-for-peso. Before we could take the next peso, we have to spend the first one given to us. See? We do own our time, every bit of it – and we are given the will to spend it as we please.

We do own every second of our life. However, because we take time for granted, we overlook the seconds and immediately jump to the days, months, even years! Have you seen a planner that actually has seconds? No. That’s because we take that 1/3600 of an hour for granted, thinking that there is nothing we could do in that very small amount of time. But we actually could, if we want to.

No one can stop time. Once a second is lost, it’s lost forever so might as well do something productive and special with it. We have to recognize that the future that we think about, the years that we look ahead is actually a series of seconds. It’s like a line – we think of it as two points connected – point A and point B, when actually it is a series of hundreds of millions of points. Time is like that. We just don’t have to make points A and B special, we have to make all the points in between special as well.

And why do we have to make every single moment special? That’s because time is limited. Yes, we own our time but we don’t know when our resources would deplete. Time is limited and because we live on a second-for-second basis, we have to accept that when the time comes that we are not given any more of it, we’re left with nothing. There’s no such thing as a time bank where we could just ‘save up for the rainy days’. Time having an ending is another lesson – if we have an infinity worth of time in this world, we would just be lazy and take time for granted all the more. However, because time is limited in real life, we have to cherish every bit as much as we could.

We have to make the most of the time given to us. Some would translate it to doing as much work as they could. Because of the book, I was opened to the idea that we could also make most of our time when we dwell on the emotions that we are in at a given moment. Embrace the feelings that you have at a given time. It’s like choosing between finishing your homework or having dinner with your family. Most of us would easily choose to finish our work, especially when we’re cramming. But when you suddenly ran out of time (because no one knows until when we’re gonna stay alive),  you’d die with your papers and you’d regret the time you could have spent with your loved ones. It’s not how much work you’ve done at one hour, it’s how happy you are while spending that hour. Dwell on the emotions and the feelings, not the work itself. Some people would think it’s more important to work than spend an hour for dinner with the people you love. We should be thankful when people shares their time with us because it means that we are so special to them that we are privileged enough to take a part of their one-time-spend resource, and to me that’s more rewarding than finishing my homework.

A lot of people tells us to live like it’s the last day of our life and this is how I interpret it – do what you love, something that you won’t regret in case it’s the last second you’d breathe. Yes, we still have to think of our future because there is still the future to look forward to but we have to keep in mind that in looking forward to our future, we must not forget the present. We have to be happy on whatever we’re doing right now because no matter how successful or grand you’d be, when you’re not happy of what you’re doing now, you would still have something to regret in the the future.

Life is an hourglass and like the grains of sand that goes through that narrow part, time goes on and on until nothing’s left. Once fallen or spent, there’s no way of getting it back.

Angel ♥