Was that it? Where did the time go? Yet another Christmas and New Year is over.
Like every Christmas, it seems the build up is continuous, and then the day is gone in the blink of an eye. Once the rest of the Turkey has been eaten it’s soon New Years Eve. The one-day when all problems are forgotten, that one moment where we promise ourselves that our lives will change forever. All for it to be forgotten the next few days.
I will admit it is a time of year where the mind does start to think about the past year. Those things we did or didn’t do. How we could have made better use of our time. Yet why is it always that once the end of the year approaches do we only think of these things?
The concept of time is extremely difficult to interpret. Admittedly the majority of us spend the majority of our lives caught up with work and family. Sometimes one takes precedence over the other, other times we wish we could just give up one for the other.
I thought about this actually a few years ago. My thoughts of how I counted down to the end of the year and then just slipped back into the routine “rat-race” just a few days later. It was only in late 2006 when my life was turned upside-down when things changed. Suddenly the “rat-race” was now a quest for more than living, it was a race for survival.
I entered a self-imposed sanctuary; I locked myself away and totally isolated myself from everyone and everything for almost a year. The emails were locked down; the mobile phone was disposed of. I needed to take stock of what mattered, what was paramount and what needed to change.
Of course, these changes did not happen overnight, it took a fair few years for everything to fall into place. Yet little by little, things that I appreciate and take for granted now started to materliaise. The trivial things that I took as being so crucial became nothing more than a distant memory. People who I once tried so hard to impress and devoted so much time to were nothing more than a shadow in the land of strangers.
Life and time immediately fused together, and all started to fall into place. It took the darkest days of my life to ensure that the brightest was about to begin. Yet nothing is all sunshine and rainbows, the world is a dark and lonely place at times and that familiar realm of the dark often hangs above my head like a winters cloud.
Yet no matter how upsetting it may seem I have found the concept of time and that is something that will never change. I value time far too much to worry about that. What is necessary is that each of us needs to take a step away from wherever we are and take a look around us.
Life never stays still for anyone.
