“Nothing is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing. It it so fleeting and slippery that anyone who wills can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning after they have acquired them. But they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, time. And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.”
Lucio Seneca
Time still remains one of the great mysteries of physics today, despite the fact that we have now evolved from an idea of linear time to a curved model, thus approaching the idea of cyclicity and repetition and so connecting ancient oriental philosophies to modern science. Quantum physics has already amply demonstrated that time that passes is only an illusion, it defines the movement in space, but it does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the latter: without time, space would not exist and vice versa. Time therefore defines change for our minds, but although there is a standard time marked by hours, minutes and seconds, perception changes based on the observer: two hours with our lover will seem like 2 minutes and 2 hours queuing on the motorway will seem like an eternity. The perception of time is therefore only mental and depends on external circumstances and on how we react to these circumstances. We are the masters of our time, we can invest it as we want, but it is limited and we cannot decide this limit! Time remains our most precious gift, and how do we invest it? We often sell it in exchange for a nice house, a nice car, a good cell phone and 3 weeks of vacation in the summer: is it worth it? There is no single answer to this question and you can only find the right answer within yourself.
How much time do you invest looking for peace and tranquility, and how much do you invest in pleasing others? How many hours are you spending making that decision that will change your life? And why do you think about all the negative things that could happen to you? And meanwhile the clock doesn’t stop: tick, tick, tick, tick, and we are so busy with our activities that the years slip away from us and one day we find ourselves wondering if those was really the life we wanted. The first step towards a happy life is to take back your time, first of all defining what your goals are, learning to say no to all the people who try to steal your time and starting a morning routine. One of the biggest problems of modern man is that he spends too much time thinking and too little acting! The only true religion is the one that says: one day you will die! And as Seneca says well in his letter to Lucilius (from which the quote was taken): “the past life belongs to death” so in reality we die every day! And this thought should free you and not cage you, the fact that your hours are numbered should make you move towards the right direction for you so don’t wait any longer because you no longer have time: the change is now!!
