WALK WITH TIME

WALK WITH TIME

Khaliqur Rahman

Walk with Time and Time walks with you. Time most often passes those who don’t know how to pass time in positive and useful ways. If you choose to have a fight and quarrel against Time, you have already chosen to lose and lose badly. Failing to plan is in fact planning to fail. Haven’t you heard this in an ad on the tv? If you choose to kill time, Time is quicker to kill you first.

Everyone says Time is all powerful, yet most of us take on time to fight against, as if to win. Those, who’ve realised Time is all powerful, choose to walk with Time. It is always advantageous to walk with power.

Nowadays, students are taking examinations. No wonder, most of them are burning the midnight oil. They’re turning their nights into days. They don’t know, and God forbid, Time can change their days into nights as Time did in the case of Milton. Time can be mercilessly cruel and revengeful.

Twenty four hours in a cycle are more than enough. It is better to strike a balance between work and rest. Balanced people sleep and rest for eight hours so that they can work for eight hours with freshness and intensity. They still have eight hours. They call these eight hours their private and personal time and use it for maintenance and enhancement. They need to wash and take bath before they eat and drink. They need to go to the club and recreate themselves and they do keep in their schedule enough time for prayers and spiritual practices to energise themselves. They watch telly and gossip, too. Balanced and wise people do have a fitness programme. They have time for everything and do everything in time.

Thus the healthy slots for sleep and rest and for personal time bring them fully charged for work and an ideal cycle goes round and round and they go a long way in the marathon of life.

Disciplined people keep an honest account of time as they do of money. They know that money goes and comes back. But Time goes and doesn’t ever come back! Life has no second innings!

It sounds simple. But most people find it very difficult. We take a late and lazy start on Sunday. Hi-hello goes on till late in the night and soon it is the proverbial Monday Morning! Nature is regular and periodic. We are irregular and aperiodic. That starts the trouble.

Jo saath na dey waqt ka wo band gharee hai (a watch,not running, doesn’t keep time), said an Urdu poet. Our watches have either stopped or run shamelessly late, particularly when we have to ‘give’. The chief guests and the borrowers come late to ‘give’ a lecture or money. We go late to ‘give’ our duties but arrive early to ‘take’ salaries. Most students are neither ‘takers’ nor ‘givers’. They blindly follow the fashion of the day in getting late. At least here they follow their elders.

The trains are late. The flights are delayed, even cancelled. The passengers for a change are at the receiver’s end. Most clerks, officers and teachers are either most often late or shirk work. The academic sessions are late. The examinations are late. The results are late. The wedding parties are late. The mail posts are late. Even speed posts are late. It seems we have lost the very sense of time and its value.

It is ironic, isn’t it, that most of us, particularly our Hindu brethren, go to an astrologer to ask for the auspicious time, the muhurta, say, for solemnization of a marriage, but the band and the dance on the street send everyone in such dodgy enthrallment that the barat is inordinately and shamelessly late, to the stunning astonishment and discomfiture of the gharatis and the pundit who found out the muhurta, if he is present. Here, I must mention my uncle. It was because of him that we reached the ‘gharatis’ good 15 minutes early! That was my wedding and that had ‘some’ effect on my son’s wedding. Good 30 years thence, I succeeded in getting everything on time! But I believe it is sheer Grace of God that men and women are able to keep time.

I find animals are far better. They follow time and Nature’s cycle naturally. For men it is anytime! We are SOPHISTICATED!

We’ve taken leave of time rather conveniently. But Time just won’t leave us. And, that would be really inconvenient.