Your time is precious, but some moments are priceless!

Today’s fast moving life has made us more competitive than our ancestors. A perfect house, a perfect car, perfect health, perfect work, perfect family, in short, a perfect life is what everyone is striving for!

Have we ever noticed that this ‘running for the perfect life’ took some most important moments of our lives? It is to be understood that this life is perfect with all its imperfections. It’s good to be successful along with all the beautiful moments cherished.

For instance, for the future of their children, parents opt for jobs that offer handsome salary but such jobs demand long working hours. In this case, they don’t have time to spend with not just their kids, but even for themselves. When a child is emotionally and physically neglected by a parent, the result is not very good.

To understand life and answer the emerging questions, children spend more time on gadgets such as phones and on the laptops. They visit various websites, use social media to find friends and people with whom they can talk and solve the mysteries of life. As time passes by, the gap between children and parents become more prominent, and slowly and gradually, they become emotionally as well as physically detached from their parents. This is the reason why children of the current era are less active, less cheerful and less obedient than the children 20 to 30 years back.

If we look back to a time when money was not just the sole purpose of life and human values were more than monetary values, people used to meet and greet each other on all occasions. They did not just spend time with family, but also with relatives, neighbours, friends and colleagues. There used to be get-to-gathers where honesty and simplicity prevailed, unlike today when such occasions become an excuse to display wealth and social status.

Elders are not giving enough time to the youth because money has become the chief objective of life and this is why they are failing miserably in raising their children properly. Time is precious and very important, and time which passes never comes back.

Therefore, time should be utilised in a better way, such as spending it with loved ones, raising the younger ones by talking and teaching them about life and its values, helping each other and learning something new, playing sports, planting trees, cooking together, watching a movie or reading a book, keeping oneself truly happy and being thankful for everything.

There are many subjects in the degree of life and one must try to succeed in all instead of topping one and flunking the other. Spend your time with family — children, parents, uncles and aunts — and friends because, according to Bertrand Russell, “Time you enjoy wasting is not the wasted time.”

Published in Dawn, Young World, June 22nd, 2019