Saturday 26 January 2013

Time!!

Time! it can be the most powerful motivating force. Thinking of the stop clock within each one of us is often shunned as morbid and depressing. Yet the same thought can be tremendously liberating if thought of as a matter-of-fact. Time is a limited resource, and it will continue to be so, until time machines and elixirs of immortality go beyond themes for sci-fi movies; any limited resource is precious and should be put to the best possible use.

Going through a journey with Time as my motivation, my reflections as a traveler are thus 

Bucket list: It is glamorous and very effective to use Time as a compelling reason to go about your bucket list. Many movies, books and quotes urge you on this path and it is indeed exciting to do the stuff you have always wanted to do.That is where my own journey began; but there is only so much scuba diving that one can do and meeting my favorite childhood sports hero depends on many factors that are beyond my control (like his wish to meet me!)  

De-addiction:  Work; it builds skills, pays money for the bills, gives us our bearings in the society, but also often drains so much that there is no time or energy for enjoyable activities. The next step on this journey, is in cultivating the discipline of regularly doing activities that are enjoyable, even though the irony is that there is no time for it!

Signing up and turning up for music lessons(though there is no hope of ever crooning like Celine Dion), a non-negotiable two hours every week in the swimming pool(with youtube as a guide to learn swimming) and sustaining my writing efforts; this was the tough regime for de-addicting myself from "being too busy" and "having just no time". The bonus was that, other aspects of life soon became a lot more bearable.

Spring cleaning: No life is perfect and there are always deficiencies and some of them can be fixed. Spring cleaning the mind, is hard and yet is essential. Some important relationships deserve more focus, some broken stuff is a drain of the time resource and some goals just need sustained effort. This act of spring cleaning, is a demanding effort, but essential to plug gaps that waste the precious resource and to free oneself of the negative forces that weigh us down and make space for other possibilities for the mind to dwell on.


Create!!: My granddad, who I never saw, was spoken about to me by the people of my town, because he dared to create a legacy of service and community work. This is an inspiring example because not everyone can become Steve Jobs; but creating something meaningful is possible in every vicinity. Commercial ventures, forums of common interests, improvement drives, voluntary service or just memorable times with friends and family; there are so many, small or big, and yet completely worthy opportunities to create!  

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The most liberating aspect of Time, is however, that it helps put situations in perspective.

"Would it matter in the long run?" is a question that we are often encouraged to ask in the face of challenging or confusing situations. It does!! we are a product of our choices, every choice we make, every fight we choose to fight or walk away from, every small and big decision that we take makes up the story of our life. So in ways that we cannot fully understand it does matter, if not to the world, to our own selves and hence there should be an alternate perspective.
 
Detaching ourselves for a few moments, is it possible to view life as a movie? Is the script so far like-able? Is it possibly to spend time in making it more interesting? The ending, no matter how long or short the movie, can it compel some audience to give it a standing ovation?