Time: A New Year’s Message

It’s about time.

New Year’s Day is upon us, and it’s about time we valued time as the precious commodity it is.

Obviously, New Year’s Eve is a time to reflect on…time…and its passing. How it’s shaped us, and hopefully, we, it.

We remember those we lost this past year and make resolutions to try to be better versions of ourselves in the year to follow.

We have been granted the gift of voice, yet many remain mute. We’re granted the gift of passion, yet many stay passive. We have the ability to tell those we are close to what they mean to us, yet many of us decline to do so. At the end of our lives, if we have squandered time, if we haven’t taken advantage of the gifts of passion and thought and feelings and language that make us different from rock or sand or moss…what have we achieved?

Don’t squander time, as we are given so little of it. “Time is of the essence” the saying goes. That is technically not true. Time is the essence. What is there without time? Could there be a “time before time?” How would it be measured?

It is time for us to speak. It is time for us to do. It is time for us to love. (And it is certainly time for us to reclaim our God-given rights from a bloated, hypocritical, ever-more tyrannical government that welcomes illegal aliens but disdains roughly half of its citizens, whose tax money it now takes and spends without regard for their concerns or wishes.)

There is a time for us to be born, to live, to give birth, and to die. Let us make sure that, when it is our time to die, we have truly lived. “Time after time” we hear clichés about time. “Does anybody really know what time it is?” “Time and again.” “Time is running out.” “Time’s up.” “I don’t have the time.” “If only I had the time.” “Halftime.” “Bedtime.” “In the nick of time.” And, at New Year’s, “Father Time.”

(Egads! Come to think of it, that’s misogynistic!)

Think about the most important relationship in your life. How has it changed over time? Why? Did you shape it or just let it happen? What have you done with your time…and theirs?

Let us not just mark time. Let’s mark lives. We need to make a New Year’s resolution that we learn the value of time and appreciate it. Did we make our loved ones lives better and richer during the immeasurably short time we are here on this planet? Did we do the things that might allow us the opportunity to walk forever with them in a heavenly light?

Were you granted the ability to love, but remain reserved and distant? Scared? Were you granted the ability to experience joy and pleasure, but refuse to use it? Were you granted the ability to feel pain, but cannot bear to do so?

It’s about time we show our spouses and loved ones the affection, respect and love they likely deserve. And we can do that, in part, by respecting, appreciating, and showing gratitude for the little time we have here on Earth. If we do so, perhaps there will be fewer infidelities and less heartbreak.

Let this shape our here and now, and act accordingly. This will also lead to a better future. For all of us.

So, if your spouse snores occasionally, or takes more than his or her “fair” share of the covers, if you don’t like it when they wake you up when coming to bed at night or leaving it in the morning, if you have no “time” for romance…think about when they are gone. Think about that first long, cold, dark night when you crawl into bed and realize that they are not there. And never will be again.

How brutal will that night be, when you reach out and there is no reassuring touch, no breathing, no “it’s okay, honey, I’m here and I love you.”

So, the logical thing to do, the moral thing to do, is to act now how you would if, after that brutal, long, cold, dark night, you awoke to find your spouse next to you in the morning and realized you had just had a bad dream.

Because, one day, all too soon, it will not have been a dream.

Perhaps our most important New Year’s resolution should be to fully realize how precious little time we have here in this life and to therefore treat our loved ones accordingly.

There is an old saying: “There’s no time like the present.” And that is true.

But an even more important truism is this: there is no present (gift) like time.

Happy New Year.