This thought came to me the other day when I found myself doing nothing. Time is one of the few things that is free. You may be retired or underemployed but time is there for you to use. You do not have to pay for it. In fact, money cannot buy time. You can’t go out and buy $50 of time. A wealthy person on the way to heaven will not be able to buy another day on earth.
In fact, the rich and famous may have money but they do not have time. Cash-rich, time-poor. They will wish that they have more time but they find that the money is useless when it comes to buying time. So they “work hard and play hard”, another way of saying that they blow their money when they have a chance to enjoy their time. Yet time is free.
Time flies and it seems especially so as you grow older. We go to work day in and out and wish the weekend will come along quickly. While we may want time, we also want the week to go past very quickly. Twenty years of life translate to 1,000 weeks. At the rate we want the week to pass, we will soon run out of time…..in a matter of a thousand weeks.
I once spent a week by myself in a small seaside town. That was the only time ever in my life when I felt that time went very slowly. Well, that’s not quite true. Time really moves slowly when you are in pain, sick and suffering; and you desperately need a doctor to do something for you. One minute of pain is too long; one day of illness is an eternity.
Some people choose to run their own business so that they can have control of their lives and time. But the reality is often the opposite. They end up being more time-poor.
You must have friends who are good at using their time. They put so much into every minute. They will arrive at their appointments, plane, train (or whatever) just in the nick of time. The rest of us arrive a little early for our appointments, read some old magazines, look around, and wait for time. I have yet to conclude which is the better approach to time.
Run the 100 metres or the marathon? Which is the better way to live one’s life?
Time – something that money cannot buy. Some people have plenty of it; others have less.
Now that I have some time…apart from "time", what are the other things which are free? Perhaps I should spend the rest of my life looking for things that money cannot buy!
