The Gift of Time

           Someone once said, "The past is history, the future is a mystery, and the present is a gift."  The only time that we can chose what we do is the present--we can't change what happened yesterday, or be certain what will happen tomorrow. So how do we spend our time; living in the moment, or thinking about the past or the future? We can chose to spend our time in an opportunistic way or a pessimistic way.

          The present moment is the only time that we are really in control of. We can chose to be pessimists and use our time negatively. We can hate our job, but not look for a new job. Most of us have a daily routine and do pretty much the same thing every day in our comfort zone. Habit drives most of what we do. Is spending several hours every day surfing the Net, texting, and checking FaceBook a good use of our time? How about watching 4-6 hours of TV every day?  Or we can be positive, live in the moment, talk to people, change our routine, try new things, go to new places, make new friends, stop doing things that waste our time, and just enjoy each moment as much as possible. 

          We all spend some time in the present thinking about the past. Many people do this, especially older people, regretting things that they did or didn't do in their lives, or remembering happy times and memories. Sometimes, we miss out on the present by always reminiscing about the "good old days." Or we can be positive and focus on the good things about the past, happy memories, the good things that we have done and enjoyed, and the accomplishments and successes that we have had. 

          What about the future? The future is mostly unpredictable, but is at least partly under our control. We often chose to think about the future in a negative way. We spend a lot of time worrying about the future. Most of what we worry about never even happens. As Winston Churchill said, "When I look back on all of my worries, I remember the story of an old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened." Or we can be optimists and look forward to the future in a positive way, focusing on our plans, goals, hopes and dreams, always expecting the best. We can make specific plans for the future and then do everything possible in the present to make those plans a reality.

          In conclusion, how we think about time is important. We can be optimists and spend our time living in the moment, thinking about the past and future in a positive way, focusing on happy memories of the past and positive hopes, plans and goals for the future. Or we can be pessimists, not taking advantage of the fleeting moments of our lives, but instead wasting time and dwelling on bad memories and regrets about the past, while worrying about the future. How do you use your time?



         

      

     

Thoughts on Time

Time is a funny thing. Scientists can't even agree if time really exists apart from what we call time on Earth. Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end of time? What is the nature of time? On Earth, there seem to be a beginning and end to all living things, including us humans. Observable stars and galaxies in our universe are apparently so old that the light we see left them billions or more light years ago. Scientists tell us that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. So light travels a long way in a year. By the time we see these stars and galaxies in our telescopes, they may have burned out and not even exist anymore. We don't know. So what about the stars and galaxies that we can't see?

On a more mundane level, here on Earth, time seems to be predicable and has to do with the movement of the Earth around the sun and the moon around the Earth. We can all agree on how long a second, minute, hour, week, month and year last. When you're a kid a year seems to last forever, but as you get older each year seems to pass faster. That makes sense, because when you're five, a year is a fifth, or 20%, of your life, but when you are 50, a year is only a fiftieth, or 2%, of your life. So the years seems to speed up as we get older. Still, in the grand scheme of things, considering the age of the universe, which isn't even known, even a relatively long human life span of 100 years is like a blink of an eye, less than a nanosecond. It's good to think about these things sometimes. It has a way of putting things in perspective.