Skip to main content

Understanding Time

You may have come across any number of articles, speeches and books on time management.
They are all spoken and written with either of these assumptions: we don’t understand time or we understand time. Unfortunately, all the people do not fit into these two categories.
The perception of time is highly subjective. It differs from country to country, city to city, person to person and for the same individual, time to time.
At times, we find ourselves behaving like we have no time to live. Other times we find ourselves relaxed as if we have all the time in the world. A self soothing argument would be that we have to do some tasks urgently and some others, at our leisure. And neither of these can be declared as right or wrong.

What the time management experts are trying to tell us is this.
(Read the italicised paragraph more than once. It contains a valuable message)

This moment that you are reading this particular word is the moment you live in. Even the ‘particular word’ changed by the time you finished this sentence. The moment you are living in now, is this moment that you are looking at this full stop.
So you see how it works?
When you read this sentence, you read this particular word. You may refer to the previous words to make sense of the current word you are reading and the words you are about to read.
You were about to read the words ‘about to read’ in the previous sentence but, by the time you finished reading them, they were already in the past and so are all the words including this last one.


We can dream about the future and make plans for the future, but we cannot live in the future. When we come to the future, it becomes the present and before we can realize, it becomes the past.
You reap what you sow.
You can sow only in the present. You can reap only in the present.
You can reap in the ‘present’ what you had sown in the ‘present’ that went by already.
Life is happening now.
An understanding of this reality can have profound impact on our perspective.
The most successful people are the ones who have a consistent perspective about time. They do not let their perspective of time change according to their needs and the urgency of their tasks.
If they find themselves straying away, they pull themselves back in.

Imagine that your perspective of time is a rope tied from point A to point B. If it is tight, it can guide you from point A to point B. If it is loose, it comes with you without resistance, in whatever direction you take it. You may or may not reach point B.

Importantly, point B has different meaning for different people.


Let's all live in the present. Now!
Wish you all the best!


 I wrote this article in my 'present' and you are have just finished reading it in your present.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pebbles.

There are numerous people around us to tell us why we shouldn't do something. They tell us not to take risks, not to upset the balance which is imaginary. This is one incident that impacted me. As part of my job, I had to visit a person in Nagercoil and train some of his employees. After the training, I sat with him and the conversation spiralled out of the gamut of my job. This was an inspiring person who was always motivated and bubbling with energy.  He told me his story, his rise as a businessman to become one of the wealthiest men in the region. I told him I wanted to do something like that myself and I laid bare a few ideas I had been toying with. When I said, ‘This is what I want to do, but I don't know how to make money out of it’, he laughed. ‘Forget the money.’, he said, rubbing his head, ‘It will come’. This made me pay more attention to his words. ‘When you are in the dark, you don't know where the bell is,' he said, expecting ack...
19 comments
Read more

The Goodwill League!

A few weeks ago, a member of the middle level management in our company called us, three new recruits, to his cabin. We expected to hear some encouraging words. ‘You are Management Trainees’, he said, ‘So which are you, Managers or Trainees?’ I found the question a little stupid. ‘So you guys aspire to be in the CXO league someday?’ he asked. We answered in the affirmative. ‘How many years do you think you will take to reach there?’, he asked. The answers were 10, 20 and 25 years. He began laughing aloud. ‘If you become CXOs in 10 years, where will I be?’, he asked, ‘I still have over 12 years of service left.’ I felt my positivity draining. He then said, ‘I have worked for 22 years in this industry. Yet I am 5 levels below the CEO. When I entered the industry 22 years back, all 37 in my batch aspired to reach the CXO league. None of them have managed to do that till now’ The three of us remained silent. I thought he was trying to motivate us in some way. ‘S...
6 comments
Read more