About a week or two ago, a good friend of mine messaged me on Whatsapp to catch up on things. During our conversation, he asked if I had stopped blogging as he had not seen new posts in a while. That same week, another friend asked me if I had lost my way after going to the moon or overshot and ended up going beyond it, in a reference to my last post back in July, “To moon and beyond“. A few days back, my wife wondered aloud as to what happened to my blog and if I had run out of interest with it.
I think I told all of them something along the lines of, yes, I have stopped for the time being but it is just temporary, a mere pause. It is not that I had nothing to say. On the contrary, as always I had a lot to say about any number of things. The fact is, since my last post I have been tied up with one activity or the other. I just could not set aside time in an effective manner to put my thoughts down into a post. My wife can attest to that, considering that she takes the brunt of listening to me articulating my thoughts on anything that I fancied about.
When I posted for the very first time (“Ahh…that first post“) on this site back in April, I was sure that I will post something worth reading, at least once a week. I suppose like everything else in life, on hindsight it was a nice goal to have but a difficult one to keep, what with all the things that I had committed myself to or contrived myself to be involved in. This of course is on top of trying to be a doting father, loving husband, a filial son and much more, all of which are in no particular order by the way.
So, I decided to set some time aside from what seems to have become the new daily grind for me and give my wife a respite from my thoughtfully melodious voice. I converted the energy usually expended on sound, while voicing out my thoughts, to the mostly kinetic kind with a smattering of sound, by typing out this post. As I was tapping away on the keyboard, I recalled something I learned the hard way, working as a software engineer and later on as a manager, managing deliveries. Time, is precious and more importantly finite. One had to manage time wisely, lest the project fails to be delivered as expected. Time was one thing that I will not be able to conjure in tiny amounts, let alone in abundance, to rescue my project.
- Souce: Pexels
Similarly, when looking at the bigger picture of life, the one resource that we all have, regardless of how wealthy or less wealthy we are, is time. How successful or unsuccessful we end up, depends very much on how well and efficiently we use the God-given precious resource called time. Over time I realised what has been working well for me thus far, was to simply reflect on what I wanted in life, figure out what I had to do, prioritise them, determine how much of time I was going to spend on each of them and then as Nike is fond of reminding us, just do it.
Along the way, it is absolutely important to periodically review how we are faring in order to make necessary changes. After all, what was important a few months ago, may no longer be important or the top priority, today. By not reviewing and restrategising as needed, we may be wasting the very thing that we are trying to save and use wisely, time.
It is equally important that while doing all of this, we bear in mind that we also have to juggle the various roles we play in life, from that of a child to our parents, a partner to our significant other, a parent to our child or as a Uber driver to the masses, just to name a few. As time is finite, if we don’t strive to spend it wisely, we may never get the chance to play the roles that we want to, let alone as well as we would like to. Sadly, by the time we are ready to play our role, the other party may have moved on with time.
My own journey in life over the past one to two years has been pretty interesting, from my point of view. I made certain decisions and acted upon those decisions. These are decisions and actions that I certainly would never thought I would do 10 years ago or even as recent as 5 years ago. As I mentioned above, it is very interesting how perception about what is important in life, changes over time. This is especially true when looking at it from the perspective of how precious time is and even more, when we realise that we don’t know how much more of it we have left with us.
For a start, I made a choice with regards to my career. A decision to leave what most if not all that I spoke with for advice, considered as a good job with a good MNC, to do something on my own. Along the way, what I want to do has remained the same but how I am going about achieving it has evolved. Then there was a new and important role that I found myself taking up. The role of a father to a wonderful little man with a big personality, who has changed the lives of my wife and mine, drastically but for the better. Sixteen months on, in the role of a father, I have no regrets in making the choices that allowed me to play this role as I have done thus far.
Being a parent myself, was a gentle reminder of how I may not have paid as much attention to my own relationship as a son to my parents or even as a partner in life to my wife, in recent times. The realisation that time rarely is on our side, has made me rethink and allocate how I spend time with my parents, wife and family. The arrival of my son after years of waiting was also a reminder of the amazing ways my maker is present in my life. I took it as a sign to prioritise my time to review my relationship with God and do what is needed to deepen my understanding of my faith further.
Coming back to my keyboard and post, I think it is about time I put the final touches and wrap it up. To my dear readers, especially those who had enquired over the past three months, I will definitely come up with more posts, more frequently. With so many things going on out there, there will always be something or the other that needs to be talked about. Now that I am done with this post, I better get started on the next item on my list and play whatever role is needed to accomplish it. After all, time and tide waits for no one, does it not? Oh….. and just in case you are wondering, no, I am not a Uber driver driving people to their destination, at least, not yet.
