When years tick away! Thoughts on time.

I welcomed the new year in total darkness and not by choice I might add.

A part of me is consumed with the urge to write something along the lines of “life without electricity” or more precisely, “how I survive(d) without electricity” but the other part — the logical part — is holding off the idea deeming the topic to be so well known to the average Nepalese that it would be a mighty boring read. Instead, let me bore you with the thoughts that filled me as I lay there in the dark amid the sound that gave birth to those thoughts — the sound, the incessant sound of the ticking clock.

Having no idea of the time (whether it was midnight or not) and no desire to acquire the knowledge, I imagined each tick represented a year passing by and sat there amazed at how quickly the average lifespan of a human ticked away. Tick, tick, tick and I was already at the end of my existence.

At that moment, with no stimulus for my eyes and the clock claiming my complete attention, I valued each passing second and a moment later I was wondering why I didn’t do so at each moment of the day, at each second of my time here on Earth — alive.

Just like when you learn a new word and start seeing it everywhere or when you come to know a concept and see it fit perfectly into every other observations you make or even when you are a kid carrying around a stapler and start noticing all the things that could be stapled (which the grown-ups don’t see!): along similar lines, the next morning, I started seeing everything intertwined with time.

When you are buying something, let’s say a pizza, you are replacing the time you’d have spent on growing all the necessary crops and then cooking it, with money. Of course, with mass production, the pizza shop has spent considerably less time on that pizza than how much you would have needed to but still, to the kid-with-a-stapler that I had become, it seemed to make perfect sense to staple money with time. Isn’t money just something you can convert into time?

But then it seemed to contradict a simple fact that is reiterated by a lot of people and whose truth cannot be doubted: time is expended at the same rate for everyone. Everyone only gets 24 hours a day and nothing more.

An excerpt from Yishan Wong’s answer to What would people advise a hypothetical 22 year old college graduate to do with his or her life?
might better put it in words:

1) Consider time your most precious resource

When you’re young, you probably have a lot of time (and probably not as much money). Nevertheless, time remains your most precious resource, and not (say) money or other physical things. This is difficult to believe when you’re younger, but money is easy to obtain. Money can be borrowed, given, and stored. None of these things can be done with time. Time is expended at the same rate constantly for everyone; its rate of expenditure cannot be slowed or stopped and perhaps more importantly, it cannot be “banked” — i.e. stored for usage later. This means that you should always be trying to make good use of your time, and when you have an excess of another resource (e.g. money), you should seek to trade it for time.

So, even if time is the same for all, you can trade/use money to free up time. We all know lots of rich people (in movies, books or in real life) who go around chasing wealth and neglect their families, health, etc. Perhaps, what happened is that they acquired plenty of money but failed to trade it for time.

Time is surely the best gift we can give to our families, friends and loved ones because it is, after all, such a precious resource. In fact, time is also the best thing you can give yourself — invest it on yourself, live for yourself. And if you are unsure as to how to invest it, learn to do so. (I’m stressing on Rizwan Aseem’s amazing answer there.)

And thus, now when I find myself in the dark and hear the clock tick away, when there is nothing to do but sleep away the time and time just slips away, I get twice as agitated for life is passing by. There is no rush, I know, but still a rush of blood boils up inside me and I get impatient. I need to change that reaction though; the clock is only doing its job of reminding us that we have a finite supply of time and it’s being used up each second whether we make use of it or not.

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of. ~ Bruce Lee