Through The Mind’s EyeTime units as parts of one’s life [Archives:2007/1115/Community]

Maged Thabet Al-kholidy
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Time passes. It never comes back. Too soon, the present becomes past and the future present. This is not a philosophy but a reality that everybody feels. The problem lies in what to do with this realization and how to use every minute in ones life.

It may seem that I am not saying anything new, nevertheless, this is to remind every one of us of how unknowingly time robes us our youth. Ironically we seem to notice, only a little too late.

When a year has passed, we realize that it will never come back. It is only when we celebrate a birthday, or a new year that we realize we lost something, we lost years of our lives.

We grieve for a while then we go back to our daily routine of wasting our precious time. Worse still, when we realize that time is robbing us of our opportunities, we do no take any procedure to save ourselves. By this, I do not mean to stop time or to keep try and live forever, but I mean to use every second doing something good for ourselves that would help us in this life and the ever after.

Almost in all the languages of the world, time indicators play a crucial role as linguistic units of time. In return, we pay less attention to them as measures of our lives.

In our talk, we clearly distinguish between past, present and future tenses. We make a fuss if someone mixes them up but as the future slowly turns into past, we hardly notice or give a damn.

Let us take the matter from a more realistic viewpoint. Did any one of us observe what he has done in a particular period of time? If anyone keeps on asking himself about what he has done everyday or every week or every month and what changes may take place in our lives, what would be the answer?

Answering such a question may make us review the time that has passed, and probably feel it has gone in vain. It will make us feel sad for that, but we will learn many things in return.

It is better to take a real case to set the idea clearer. Suppose any one of us counts what he has done for the last week. Many things might have been done. But are these things are enough to be done in such a period of time?

Since it is the first time to take it into account in this way, we may say that there was no plan for the things to cover all the time. This is the first lesson we may learn from this. For the next week we will prepare plans in which we arrange the things to be done through the coming week. Such plans will remind us of the importance of every minute in which we should do something.

At the end of the next week, we count what have been done. According to the plans, there might be something missed because of bad arrangement or any relevant reason. This time again, we are going to learn another lesson which must be taken into account in the plan of the next week.

This way, many lessons will be learnt to solve further problems we may face. At the same time, it would enable us to be aware of time as units of our life. Subsequently, we would do more and more things to save every unit of time. This is only one way we arrange plans according to that time we have. There are many other useful ways and actually it depends on the person's choice.

At last, the tone of the article may sound gloomy to some readers. I am sorry for that. My aim is for the sake of all of us to get self-satisfaction of how we spend our ages better than to regret at the end, as the proverb says 'cry over the spilt milk'.

Majed Thabet Al-kholidy is a writer from Taiz, currently doing his M.A. at English Dep, Taiz Uni. He is an ex-editor of English Journal of the University.
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