Time is a concoction of human beings. We like to time measure everything, be it in seconds (if you are an Olympic athlete), minutes, hours, years, lifetimes. Your mind has trouble understanding let alone answering the question “how old do you think you would be now if you didn’t know when you were born?”.
The concept of time began to annoy me years ago when I became a Leisure and Recreation Planner. People could only think of leisure as free time, even a waste of time…and who has free time when you need to work for success, money and the mortgage?
So I decided it’s time to do something about people’s obsession with time.
Nature doesn’t work to a clock. In fact it doesn’t ‘work’ …it just naturally grows, flourishes, matures and (flora) blossoms. Trees, plants or animals don’t retire and stop growing at some predetermined time. Yet nature is busy – reeeally busy (even though you won’t see much movement unless you have a time lapse camera (damn I said time again). There is untold and unseen co-operation and collaboration going on (it’s called ecology) plus rain and all that activity that goes on below the ground.
And when you realize we are in fact part of nature (not something above or in charge of it) you get a different perspective on human existence…we be (which is why we call ourselves human beings…funny that). For humans to grow and mature we have to be seen to be actively doing things. If we just stood there like a tree we would keel over and die (if we haven’t been hit by a car).
I prefer the word experience. We experience living so long as we keep at it and our health lets us keep at it. The ingredients contained within your seed are different to those of any other person, in the form of unique gifts/talents, passionate interests and potential achievements/contributions to others. Your seed naturally grows into the person you are today, through the active development of your talents and passionate interests.
You are identified not by the work you do but by what others value in you and make you different. Your growth is based not on how long you have lived to date but by the depth of your knowledge, experience, insight and wisdom. These in turn are the product of your expressed and developed natural-born talents and passionate interests.
Leisure becomes the creative expression of your natural abilities for the sheer joy of the experiences you create. It becomes an integral part of a productive, meaningful and therefore successful life. Leisure differs from work only in that the product is totally yours while the product of work is subject to the expectation of others who cannot know the real you – the person only you know , the natural abilities unique to you and the potential only you can realize. Would that the world could be the product of such freedom of creative expression. How much better would be your mental health, how much better you would age and enjoy life, how much saner you would become and collectively how much real progress would society achieve.
And when you are totally absorbed in an enjoyable experience, you forget all sense of time. My case rests.
Got time to make a comment below?
