Perhaps not the most cheerful start to the week, but thoughts of mortality and how brief our time here is have been on my mind these last few days - for easily understandable reasons, the anniversary of my mum's passing, my father in law's 86th birthday, my wife's cousin's terminal illness - concentrating the mind.
This morning she (Di, my wife) and I were talking about how much time we waste as a result of forgetting how precious a commodity it is. Actually I think what we forget is how finite a commodity it is - at least in our day to day experience of it.
We kind of want to have our cake and to eat it too, most of us are all too aware of the seemingly finite nature of time when we have a deadline to meet, places to go, people to see. Which is great because it gives us an excuse to be impatient with people, to take our stress out on them.
We manage to lose that awareness when we're putting off catching up with one of the more distant members of our family (perhaps not even that distant), or making the change in our lives we've been promising (ourselves) we're going to make, or making up after an argument with a loved one - perhaps apologising for the impatience mentioned above.
Put another way, we lose our awareness of the finite nature of our time here when it comes to doing things we don't really want to do, things we think we know we should do, but we're not convinced we actually want to.
Do we really lose our awareness or do we shove it under a handy metaphoric carpet (available in all good crystal and incense shops)?
I am increasingly entertained by the truth in all those things my mum used to say which used to drive me nuts - "theres no such word as can't" (to which obviously, when one's mum says it, it is essential to look superior and start with "well actually.....) - "it takes one to know one" (ask any psychologist about projection) - "there's no time like the present," for some there is no time but the present - either way, we can't be in the future and we can't be in the past, so we'd best be in the present and get on with our lives.
If you are "putting off until tomorrow what you can do today" - do yourself a favour, stop it!
