Most precious thing in your life

When you get near the end of your life what will you look back and think is the most precious thing that you have had? Life itself? Love? Family? Money? Success? Travel? Good fortune? Friends? Good health? The list of ‘possibles’ is almost endless. You will be thankful for them all, I hope. But before you read on try to answer the question: What is the most precious thing you have?
While you are thinking about it, reflect on the care you take of your body, of your mind, of your children, of your money, of your property. You are probably a good, caring person. Pretty smart at handling the world, I shouldn’t wonder.
There is only one true answer to the question. I expect you’ve got it by now. Our most precious gift is time. Rudyard Kipling put it very well in his poem ‘If’’ when he said:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
with sixty seconds worth of distance run
yours is the world, and everything that’s in it
and, which is more, you’ll be a man, my son.
The Rubyiat of Omar Khyamm was more direct and less providential:
Come fill the cup, what boots it to repeat
how time is slipping underneath our feet,
unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,
why think about them if today be sweet?
One of my favourite sayings about time is:
What is this world if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare?
Standing and staring doesn’t imply laziness. On the contrary, the writer is asking us to spend time in reflection, thinking occasionally rather than rushing about frenetically doing. Reflecting is becoming an increasingly rare commodity in the world and we are missing it badly. Do you reflect enough on what is happening to the world, on what is happening in your life, on what is happening to the society in which you live? I can illustrate the lack of reflection by the quality of the legislation being passed in Europe today. Almost all the bills reaching the European countries statute books in the last ten years have been badly thought out and have had unintended – sometimes disastrous - consequences. Why is this?
One reason is that they have often (usually?) been ‘knee-jerk’ reactions. Something goes wrong; a bill is hastily constructed to, apparently, deal with the problem. The full consequences of the bill are not thought through. I can think of many such UK bills and Government ‘initiatives’. I’ll illustrate with one. Britain is short of teachers. So the Ministry issues an average of twelve pages of guidelines A DAY to schools. This requires a teacher full time to read these guidelines and interpret what they mean for his or her particular school. Net result – one less teaching teacher per school. That doesn’t help the teacher shortage.
If you have ever been in England you will know the expression: ‘Time, Ladies and Gentlemen, please’. Every barman has had to call it at some stage or another to announce the closure of the bar. Alas, no longer. In an attempt to reduce the widespread and extremely serious problem of ‘binge drinking’ in England (drinking to a stage where hospitalisation is often needed) the law has been changed to allow pubs and bars to stay open for twenty-four hours. (And, yes, you can read that again if you think it is nonsense. Unfortunately, true nonsense.) As every senior policeman has said allowing more time for drinking is unlikely to reduce alcoholism.
The business of time has now become big business. Notice how often you call a service and reach a menu – worse, a series of menus. Those menus hold you up. In the end, you virtually always need someone to talk to. They are all busy so you wait in line for the ‘next available customer service officer’. The company is very happy that you should wait. They are making money from the phone call – oh yes, part of the cost of the call ends up in their pockets. They’d like you to be on the ‘phone all day and all night. They’d make more money that way.
What they are actually doing is stealing your time. If they stole you money you would take them to court. Why can we not sue for waste of time? It is more precious than money.
Here’s a suggestion. When you are being given bad service by a company and you have to spend a long time calling them and writing to them, send them a bill for your time charged out at the rate at which you earn money. If everyone did this, sooner or later someone would sue and, in the end, someone would win. That would make companies think more carefully about how they squander your time and mine.
After all, when they do so they are robbing us of our most precious gift – time.
*****
Happiness is a journey, not a destination