Friend or Foe

Passage of Time

• Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. ~ Carl Sandburg
• How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flown. How did it get so late so soon? ~ Dr. Seuss
• It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.  ~ George Harrison

When I was growing up many years ago, I had a friend that I was sure would be my best friend forever.  As I went through the early stages of life, I appreciated my friend and I sometimes abused the relationship.  I was positive that I was going to go through life with the advantage of my special relationship.

Yesterday When I Was Young

• Time is an equal opportunity employer.  Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day.  Rich people can't buy more hours.  Scientists can't invent new minutes.  And you can't save time to spend it on another day.  Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving.  No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.  ~Denis Waitely

One day after I turned 33 years of age, I started to realize that my friend was turning on me.  My best friend was now becoming my worst enemy.  There is nothing I can do to turn the friendship around.  Looking back I see the many missed opportunities, and wasted efforts, chasing unrealistic dreams.

I’m not the first to be wasteful and I won’t be the last; the difficult times of the 1900, the pioneer struggles of moving West, for many it was and is the immigration to the United States.  Opportunities abounded for many, and yet like me, many squandered the opportunities before them.

Many events in our lives have a tendency to control large blocks of time.  Everything we do or commit to has a time consequence.  If only we could be cautious on how we spend our time and thus preserve it, like in the movie “In Time” with Justin Timberlake.

• In a future where people stop aging at 25, but are engineered to live only one more year, having the means to buy your way out of the situation is a shot at immortal youth. Here, Will Salas finds himself accused of murder and on the run with a hostage - a connection that becomes an important part of the way against the system.
• In this obvious science fiction thriller you can borrow time or buy additional time, but the clock is always running as in real life.  The big difference being that in real life we don’t know when the clock will run out, and in this film you can see the meter running out.
• The other major difference between real life and the film is that in the film you never age beyond 25 years old.  I am not sure that I like the trade-off.

We often try to rationalize that time goes by faster as we get older.  In actuality time always moves at the same pace, we just get busier and don’t notice the time passing by.  The biggest culprit is over commitment; time would seem to slow down if we allowed ourselves to slow down enough to actually be bored at times.

One of the biggest examples of time waste, would be that you don’t devote enough of your youth to a quality education, for the benefit of the long term future. Always seeking immediate gratification while young can lead to eventual regrets.  My best and worst friend is and has always been time.  With time and a little wisdom we have mended fences, and are now getting along.  The best is yet to come…