When I was a kid, I thought a year took forever to end. I could not wait until summer came, and it seemed like the three months of summer lasted a long time.
We did not have e-mail or the internet, so we wrote letters to our friends and family that lived elsewhere. It took a week to get a letter to its destination, and then another week to receive one back.
If we wanted to research something, it involved a trip to the library, and then many times it took hours to find what it was that we were looking for. There were index cards to locate books with, not computers. It was all done manually.
Weekends were long and lazy times. We did not have scheduled time, or homework to do, that was all done during the week. We relaxed and had leisure time.
Well all of those things are a thing of the past. Now summer seems to last for a few weeks, letters have now been replaced by instant e-mails, research is done in seconds on the Internet, and everyday has some kind of schedule and something that has to be done on the to-do list.
I don't know if it is our world of technology that has sped everything up, or if time really is moving faster. I thought it was the technology until a friend of mines five year old daughter announced at the end of her first year in kindergarten, "Mommy, kindergarten went by really fast!".
What does she have to even relate it to? She isn't involved with the fast moving tech part of our existence. Kindergarten was a fifth of her life, how could she possibly feel time going by fast?
What I do know is that all of my teen students have the feeling that time zooms by. They do not feel as I did at their age that time moved on like a snail.
What ever the reason for it, time is at warp speed. I closed my eyes at 39, and opened them at 56. That is how fast it feels. Knowing this, it is important to understand that this life is just a blip on the radar screen. It is fast and fleeting. Best to make the best of it by not wasting it.
Do you put things off because you think you have an endless amount of time? Do you think that it will take forever before you start getting old? Do you feel like you can create your life later because you have so much time?
It has been my experience that we do not have the time that we think. If you have a dream to do something, begin working on it now. Many of my students have dreams of starting a business, or going to a certain college, but they think they have lots of time before they have to begin thinking about it. They don't. Many of them are going to be seniors this coming fall, and now is the time to begin planning for that college, or trade school, or whatever dream they are hoping for.
There is a old saying, "The early bird gets the worm." In our world today that is so true. There are so many people vying for certain careers, jobs, and dreams. If you are not aggressive with your education and planning, you just might be left behind. Time will march on without you.
Time is precious, and we need to remember that. If you have plans or dreams, work on them now. Tomorrow may seem far away, but it is not. You will find yourself a decade older in what may seem like no time at all. Talk to anyone who is older, and they will tell you the same thing.
You do not want to wake up at forty years old and say "Oops, I forgot to plan for my life".
Being mindful of time. This life will not last forever!
Till Tomorrow,
Queenie
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