Importance of time

 Life is short and yet man spends it like a prodigal, as if it were eternal and he, immortal. Most of us do not understand the value of time, the most valuable gift from God.

The waste of time we indulge in is really surprising. Most of us have not been taught or told how to value and use this treasure called time. The precious minutes which can be turned to excellent use are wasted away in thoughtless and purposeless activities. If man takes care of his minutes then the hours and days will take care of themselves. Time is more precious than money. Time is universal and eternal. We all grow in time, live in time and ultimately perish in time. Time may not be defined exactly, but we all know what it is and how valuable.

Our life is a bubble, a short morning dream, brittle as glass and, therefore, we should take good care of it and make the best use. We all want fame, success, happiness, and prosperity but only a few are able to achieve this because only they make the best use of their time. Time and tide wait for none. They cannot be commanded. They are to be used in the best possible manner. We should be prepared to make the best use of an opportunity when offered. Time once lost can never be recovered.

The flow of time is ceaseless and eternal and we all are like small, insignificant and helpless particles in this endless and continuous flow. Time is destiny. It is more powerful than the most powerful monarchs, princes, and rulers. These come and go but time is forever, eternal, without an end, without any beginning. Time is creation, birth, growth, ageing, decay and also death. Nothing escapes time. Time is abstract but its footprints are concrete and palpable. Time may be spent wisely or foolishly. The choice is ours and so are its consequences. It is the basic building block that goes in making our success, career, happiness, and status in society.

Shakespeare has declared in a clarion call:

There is a tide in the affairs of man

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and miseries.

On such a full sea we are afloat,

And we must take the current when its serves,

Or lose our ventures.

All great and successful men and women have been great economizers of time. They never squandered their evenings, mornings, afternoons or nights but used them in the best possible way. This helped them to not only find place in the history of mankind but could also change its course. They have left their footprints on the sands of time:

Lives of all great men remind us we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

We should try to follow these great and successful people, the heroes of history, the guiding stars of humanity.

It is foolishness to think that we can make up for lost time. The past is dead and the future unborn. There are no tomorrows and yesterdays. It is today which is important. It is really sad that people spend their present in repenting over the uselessly spent past. Shelley has underlined this tragic fact so beautifully, thus:

We look before and after, and pine for what is not: Our sweetest laughter, with some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

It makes one sad and hopeless to think how all the teachings, sayings and fables of the wise, the sages, the seers, the poets, the divinities, and great men of learning and letters have been of no avail in the matter. We waste our precious moments either grieving over the past blunders or making castles in the air for the future. In other words, we waste today in fretting over the dead yesterday, or in day-dreaming about tomorrow, which yet does not exist at all. And it reminds the well-known and oft quoted lines of Macbeth, the famous tragedy of Shakespeare: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and the tomorrow, creeps in this petty peace from day-to-day To the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Men are great, good and famous in proportion of the time best utilised. All men and women of substance make the best use of time and opportunity. In this context, it has been beautifully said that, ‘Time wasted is mere existence, used is life’. How many of us are really alive in this sense is the million dollar question? Time is eternal, boundless, and endless and without either end or beginning but for us, as individuals, it is very limited, finite and short-lived. You can neither borrow nor steal nor earn time. When we say ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, we say the same thing idiomatically. A work done in time is time earned; a decisive action at a given moment is vital.

Successful men and women seldom talk of leisure because they hardly have any time to spare. Their every moment is well planned. It is the idler who has sufficient time to gossip, to indulge in loose talk, to rue the lost past and to build castles in the air for the future. Such people should heed the advice of the poet: Think not a trifle, though it small appear,

Small sands make the mountain; moments make the year, and trifles, life.

A proper use of time means the right use of an opportunity. Remember, time is money. It is precious and it waits for none. How important are small moments in life is again underlined in the following lines of poetry:

Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean and the beauteous land and the little moments.

Humble though they be, make the mighty ages of eternity.

Opportunities are few and far between. That is why they are rare and called golden. The wise make the best use of them when they occur. Those of us, who miss them or fail to recognise them in time, have to repent all our life. It also implies that we should be punctual and regular in our work- schedule. Nothing should be done in fits and starts. We are often plagued with lethargy, passivity, indecision, procrastination and vacillation and these are our greatest enemies.