12/2010
With Thanksgiving becoming a distant memory and Christmas having come and gone, we stand at the threshold of a new year. It’s hard to believe we are about to let 2011 slip into the record books. Wasn’t it just a few months back that we were saying goodbye to 2010? Time is a squirmy little concept. Years seem to fly by. You close your eyes and it seems your kids have grown and flown from the nest. On the other hand, yet you stand in line at the checkout counter and your patience can find itself stretched to capacity in a mere matter of minutes. Crazy how it works, isn’t it?
Think about it. You start off the work week; get bogged down in the stress and find yourself wishing time would slip into high gear and bring those days off flying around the corner. You hit the weekend and you’re putting on the brakes trying to slow the clock down so you can have just a little more time! You wake up an hour before the alarm clock goes off, glance at the time before drifting back off to sleep and it seems that last hour just wasn’t enough. You sit in the waiting room of the doctor’s office watching the second hand tick tortuously around in a circle and that hour seems like an eternity.
How can a single measurement of time cause so many different reactions?
I’ve talked about time in many different ways in the blog articles. I guess it’s just something which intrigues me. I’ve talked about trading time to our employers for money and sharing time with family and friends; time as a commodity. The thing is none of us really know how much time we have, so we simply don’t know how valuable it is. When something is in short supply, the value goes up; like a shortage of fuel or a limited collector’s item. If we really knew how much time we had, we would probably be spending it on the things which we valued the most.
We’re at the beginning of another school year. Wow! Those kids have no idea how fast their time will pass them by. Most of them live with the idea that they have plenty of time ahead of them. Parents will be talking about managing their time so they have enough time for school work. They will need to balance the amount of time they devote to sports, friends, and work. Above all else, how do we teach them that their time is valuable and limited?
Of course, their carefree spirits towards time and life in general will allow them to live life more fully. They’ll take more risks than we’d like them to take. They’ll see life as an adventure and an experience to be savored. In short, many of them will want to use their time for fun and we want them to enjoy being kids. One day, however, they may find themselves wishing for time to slow down so that they can do all they wanted to do. They will hope for enough time to spend with the people they care most about. And, they’ll stare at that clock on the office wall hoping for time to speed up so they can get off work and have time to themselves. They will see their own kids wasting their time and they’ll encourage them to use it more wisely.
