Time=Friend or foe?

What is time? We measure it in days, hours weeks, years........ But have you noticed that 5 minutes one day can seem like 5 hours the next day and vice versa. When you're looking forward to something the time seems to drag and you think that it'll never arrive. Yet, doesn't that dental appointment or exam come round all too quickly! It never ceases to amaze me how half an hour in the dentists chair seems never ending. yet half an hour on the phone to a friend flies by!

 Round about the time of the due date of our first grandchild we were waiting. Every time the phone rang our hearts skipped a beat as we wondered-is this it? The past few days had been interminable yet we might have to wait for another 9 days for the call that will make us both ecstatic and relieved. If I'm feeling like this, how much worse it must be for my daughter-in-law who I knew was totally fed up and just wanted the pregnancy to be over. Time for her lay heavy on her hands. I'm sure that there's many women who'll identify with that feeling. I tried to take my mind off it by thinking of some of the attributes of time.

Time a Friend.

We have this image of a kindly Father Time. When you're a child every day seems to last for ever, but in a good way. A year seems like an eternity and you think that you have all the time in the world. Time is a friend. Yes, it may seem to drag a bit when you're waiting for a special event, like your birthday or Christmas-how long was the run up to Christmas! But it's usually an exciting wait and adds to the wonder of the occasion. Adults can also experience the excitement of the run up to a special event but as you get older this can be tempered by anxiety and the stress of organising the events. Christmas and weddings being among them.  Time can seem to be going slowly as you look forward to the event, yet at the same time, too fast when there seems so much still to do and so little time left to do it in!

 

Time an Opportunity.

 As young people we see time as an opportunity to get out there and start to live our lives the way we want too and not the way we're told too! Teenagers and students live their lives almost in another time dimension, sleeping late in the day and staying up to the 'wee small hours', 'burning the candle at both ends'. Perhaps in their youthful arrogance they're trying to show time who's boss. With an abundance of energy they seem to fit more into 24 hours than the rest of us. To some of them 30 is really old and they live life as if they need to cram all their living into those 30 years.

Time the Thief.

As you grow older, time seems to shorten and becomes like a thief, stealing the hopes and ambitions that you didn't get around to fulfilling. There never seems to be enough hours in the day! Yet, each birthday adds another year on to your tally, a sign that you haven't got as much time left to do the things you'd planned! What a cheery picture I'm painting! But that's when the passing of Time can act as a wake up call, when we can take stock and decide on our priorities and if it's within our power, make any changes necessary to claim back areas of our lives that have been stolen by the lack of time.



Time is Precious

I think it's fair to say that most of us waste at least some of our time and there are as many ways to do that as there are hours in the day, so I won't go into that, except to say that for me Facebook is one of them! But there are times when you want to make the most of each moment. When you fall in love for example, you want to spend as much time as possible with the object of your affections and time drags when you're apart. Unfortunately for some there are also times when we face losing someone we love and each hour, minute even, is a bittersweet eon of time. At times like this Time can seem like the enemy which we try in vain to fight; to hold back time; yet knowing it's a fight we can't win.

Time is Now

It's one of life's irony's that as we grow older, so time seems to move faster. You read so many stories and see so many dramas and films of  people who get to a certain age and look back at their lives and wish they'd done things differently. But regrets are just another waste of time! When you come to this realisation, if at all, then instead of wasting yet more time why not start to make some changes. We all have to face the Grim Reaper at some point, that's one of life's few certainties. In terms of time we only have this day, this moment and it is said that 'time waits for no-one'. So why am I sitting here writing about time? Well for one thing I enjoy writing and if you're enjoying something, how can that be a waste? I now have less time to wait for the phone to ring! If there is a lesson to be learnt, it is that time is precious and not to be wasted. So why not go for it, do that thing that you've been thinking about for months or even years. The only time that is wasted is time spent wondering what if, instead of doing what is! ©