I Don’t Have Time!

We don’t have time. In fact, a number of readers might even not read this to the end for the reason that they don’t have time.

We keep hearing things like time is short, time is money, we must not waste time, always be on time, there is a time for everything, the time is not right, and so on throughout our lives. As we move on in years, we hear ourselves uttering tragic remarks like, time went by too quickly, I didn’t notice how swiftly time passed, I have wasted too much time and the like. This, for all practical purposes, is an illusion.

To understand the illusory nature of this belief of not having enough time, we have to see how we measure time. The passing of day and night, coming and going of seasons, the physical and other changes brought upon us and those around us show us that time is passing. Even more so, with the invention of the clock in the Middle Ages and then its spread to all corners of the globe to the extent that life without it is inconceivable in the modern world, has divided time into even smaller portions. Where time was normally divided into dawn, noon, evening, sunset and night, i.e. five parts, we now are capable of dividing it into seconds, which means one day has 86,400 parts. Hence, even if nothing much changes, we still feel the passage of time and consequently also believe that we are wasting it.

To find a way to get out of this dilemma we have to stop concentrating on the temporary aspects of life and the universe. Our predominant concentration on the years, days, hours and minutes traps us in a circle where everything keeps changing so speedily that we sometimes fall under the extreme illusion that the speed of time is actually increasing. Here, religious and spiritual people can be of much help. Take a look at the lives of priests, yogis, Sufis and the like. You will never see them in a hurry, or gloomy for the reason that time is flying by and being wasted. The reason is that these people are predominantly concerned with things which are not bound by time, or in other words, are eternal. They concentrate on the existence and characteristics of God, the creation, cause and end of the world, the moral and ethical principles which define right and wrong on the criteria of absolute truth, on the messengers of God and their message, on the heavens and so on. All these things are either eternal or relate to such huge expanses of time compared to our own mundane existence that they seem eternal. They don’t change with time. An eye on these eternal realities from time to time takes the mind off all the speedily changing stuff and we realize that though time does pass, it does so only for a very limited, to the extent of being infinitesimal, proportion of things. Most realities do not change with time as much. And if the truly important things don’t change, time does not seem to go by that quickly at all.

Meditation and prayer routines are a great help in this realization. Even taking a little time out of the daily routine to concentrate on eternity completely changes the perspective with which we look at life. Just closing your mind to the daily businesses and sitting calmly does the trick. I can almost hear some readers thinking that they don’t have time to indulge in such activities. This response is another absurdity since all it means is that ‘we do not have the time to realize that we actually do have time’. Amusing if you just read it but tragic if you actually believe it.