Appreciate time — the non-renewable resource

In our younger years, we can’t wait to grow up. We wish that we would grow up faster. You always want to be older and more experienced. What if we showed greater appreciation for the stage we were in and didn’t wish so much for the next best thing? This does not mean to say that we don’t appreciate being five when we celebrate our fifth birthday, but it asks us to think about the experiences that we have in our different years as we embark on our journey through life. After all, growth takes time.

I can remember when I was younger and showed an impatience towards time, older family members used to say to me “be careful what you wish for, there will come a time when you are older where you just want to slow time down”. I didn’t pay too much attention to it then, but there are indeed times in my life today where I wish I had a time machine at my disposal.

This offers a stark contrast to when we wanted to speed things up and may have been impatient. Time is a non-renewable resource and we should be careful what we wish for. Engaging at different stages of our life, we will have different concepts of what time is. Wanting to both speed it up, slow it down, and maybe even rewind it.

As I sat down to write this piece today, my mind drifted to thinking about how time and consistency can lead to impact.

Impact in its simplest form could be viewed as a series of concentric circles/events/occurrences that build on top of and with one another. Layers that age, change, and adapt through time. What has happened before this point in time will guide the impact and may dictate the scale and spread of it.

So, appreciate the now. Learn from the past, present, and grow into the future. But don’t waste the non-renewable resource of time.