August 2014 Editorial - My Struggle with the Quarterly Alarm!

Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we have got! Yes! Indeed… Time is money; time is everything… With the people we love the most, all we want is more time, time to talk, time to meet, time to eat together, or sometimes time to just sit and gaze at each other. When things go wrong we say “my time is running bad” when life is perfect, we say “the good times have started”. We believe that time is a healer and it heals all our wounds! We come back from a great family vacation, we actually rejoice on the quality of time we spend with the family. We walk out of a pathetic review meeting, we sulk on the terrible two hours of frustrating conversation we had with our colleagues! At all times it’s the moment we celebrate or mourn! A mix of such good and bad moments is what we call our LIFE! When we look back at our life in flashback, it is a combination of these good and bad times! Sadly what is meant to be everything is what we keep fighting with or against always! It is always a race against time! We race with time right from our childhood to reach school, or the examination hall, to our first interview, to our first date, reaching in time to work, a father- to-be struggles to make it in time to see his wife deliver their bundle of joy, a child tussles to reach his dying parent before the last gasp of breath, and the struggle continues in our “OH SO BUSY” lives! It is simply never ending. Whether we are a working professional or a homemaker or even a student, we never find the day enough. Every single day, we feel we needed an extra hour or minute to make that call to an old friend, or finish a meeting with a client, or reach a stationery store to pick up our child’s books, change the curtains, pay the bills, etc. 24 hours seem to be too less! Our expectations from ourselves are so high, that we are constantly battling it out with time to make every single minute count, every single second worth its while. From childhood our minds are conditioned to win this race against time and we gradually realise that we always seem to lose against time! While it is correct that time waits for no one, as, WE may delay, but TIME will not. How do we tackle the evils of procrastination if we do not respect the time we have on hand to finish what is meant to be done in time? But at the same time, there is never enough time to do all the ‘nothing’ we want to! After all, the time we enjoy wasting is not wasted time! The crux is to find a balance in doing nothing and doing all that needs to be done in an appropriate time! Sometimes coming home from work and simply watching my kids play amongst themselves is the best time of the day for me! I am actually doing nothing, while the time demands that I at least play with them if not cook a meal in the kitchen! I often wonder what more of a waste of time is, watching TV or just simply doing nothing? I strongly feel that it is ok to sit and do nothing, or talk nonsense, or chat up with an old friend or simply gaze outside the balcony but watching the IDIOT BOX is the real criminal waste of time for me, especially when my husband is watching it! But my husband who sells real time on television surely does disagree with me! Although I feel that we allow a lot of such criminal time killers to rule over our ‘awake’ time we have, that we could have put to better use! Even if that means sipping a cup of coffee with our favourite people and music around us or ‘whatsapping’ with some friends, or posting pictures on FB or clicking pictures in a social gathering, which to some of us means spending quality time with our loved ones, but to some it means sheer waste of time! What is important is that we all get our dose of doing nothing, but not at the cost of procrastination! Had I procrastinated lesser and spent lesser time doing nothing, I would probably have submitted my editorial well in time, and perhaps motivated myself to pick another subject than try and deal with this complicated phenomena called ‘time’ in a short article. Lack of time probably is just an illusion created by my own mind that is yet dealing with the want to do nothing, and doing everything in limited time that I have! Somehow I can visualize my late father-in-law chuckling mischievously over me for cribbing over something that he so efficiently managed! He perhaps was busier than me but managed this very same editorial month on month without ever sulking about any lack of time, which surely tells me that I am perhaps going miserably wrong in my management of time if I cannot manage an article even once in a quarter. Yes! I call this quarterly phenomena of writing an editorial for Prabhu Tarun my ‘Quarterly Alarm’ as the name suggests, I have to write it every fourth month! Someone so rightly said that ‘Time is what we want most, but what we use worst’. I close with a little introspection on the same thought and with a hope, that the next time I face this struggle that I call a ‘Quarterly alarm’ I will perhaps win it hands down against the ever ticking time!