Time Is Not My Friend

I made mention in another post that “time is not our friend”. There are certain realities that begin to dawn upon our dim minds as the years fly by. It is a fact that time is an equal opportunity employer, everyone living has the same 24 hours in every day. It is observable and very obvious that some people make better use of their time than others. However, the way one uses their 24 hours is subject to personal taste. What you might consider a ‘waste of time’, someone else might highly value. Unless everything in life is reduced to “dollar and cents value”, the way we spend our time can be either helpful or harmful depending on the viewpoint of the one who’s time is being used.

It is true the real cost of an item is the “amount of our life” it takes to earn the money to pay for it. Everyone’s time is not equal when it comes to that equation, it depends on how much you earn with your time. For a doctor, who’s time is certainly more valuable in dollars than my time, an item that might cost me a weeks ’time’, may only cost him an hour. Either way we must decide if something that costs hard earned money is worth the amount of our lives it takes to purchase it.

Everyday I live it seems that time moves faster, a common delusion that comes with aging. I recall when I was much younger and spend a great deal of my time in a boat. I had a friend, much older, who always said he wanted to go fishing. But every time I invited him, he would say he did not have time this week. He was a woodworker. Now I am a woodworker, my boat did not leave the yard this past summer! My excuse, other than the extreme amount of gas it takes to get to a lake from this ’rocky farm’, is that I never get the time.

This leads me to reflect on the reality of how much time it takes to do jobs that, say 20 years ago, would have taken half the time. Somehow as we get more pressed for the time to do the things we want, we also get slower at doing the things we must, so we either live in a perpetual state of “hurry” or we learn to take one day at a time and be thankful we have that day and the health to do whatever activity we are involved in. We may not have tomorrow.
There are many people who would consider time spend fishing, a waste. While the same person will take a set of ‘sticks’, called golf clubs, and whack a little white ball all over what ought to be a cow pasture! I guess this gives my opinion of golfing away. Oh, I have been on a golf course, it was nice too. The ‘gentleman’ that took me, told me (this was also many years ago in the land of the south) that golfing was a “gentlemen’s sport”, it was his decided opinion that I should learn it. He only took me once. His observation was that some people just did not have the makings of a “gentlemen”, that is as defined by a certain class of southerners.

At this same period of time, I had another friend who was a fishermen, good one too, unlike some of us who just enjoy the effort regardless of the outcome. Over a two or three year period of time when I knew these two fellows as very good friends, there was only one trip to the golf course, but there must have been a hundred or more trips with the boat and fishing gear to various water holes in southwest Kentucky. Now that was not a waste of time! You cannot eat a golf ball, even if you do whack it on the head and manage to retrieve it from the field, which was a challenge in itself, since the little rascals love to head for the nearest water hole or high grass, at least when I swing on them. But fish become food! Something useful to me.

In those days I thought, and felt like, I had all the time in the world, even under that circumstances that I put in many more hours a week at “employment” than I do now. Somehow the only thing that has changed is me. There are still 24 hours in a day & 365 days in a year. This is why I have come to the conclusion that “time is not my friend”. As each year passes, ‘father time’ picks up the pace, while Ernie gets slower and slower, and I am relatively young! What must it be like for the “old timers”? At some point it must become clear that we are not going to get done all the things we plan to, but I have observed that not many people want to accept that as reality. I am certainly not ready too. Nor do I think it is healthy to just sit down and say, “I’m done”, that would be no fun. Our nature is not designed for giving up, this is why we often meet aged folks who are in what is clearly the last stages of their life, but they always talk about what they are going to do “when they get better”. At times it is saddening, but then we realize that as long as a person has something they plan to do, they have a reason to keep living and often do recover to a health that surprises everyone around them.

Take the time
Look around you, find something that you want to accomplish and lay your hand to the plow and get at it. Even if it is as simple as fishing. to do the things you most desire while you have it. There is nothing more pitiful than seeing older people living with regrets about all the things they could have done, but did not take the time. I speak here of things that are realistic and possible, not of dreams that would ‘break the bank’. At times it is wise to refine our dreams to things that we can do, rather than “waste” away our lives, standing at the “wishing well”, dreaming of something that is just not practical, all the while we could be doing other things that are just as satisfying if only we would stop looking down the wishing well.