Life is all about timing. From the number of minutes you allow for the perfect brew to finding your soul mate. Most top chefs will ask any wannabe commis to break an egg and then boil one (with shell). A perfectly boiled egg is pretty hard to achieve but when the timing is right, my, what a treat (with buttered soldiers, bien sûr).
In a film called ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’, the final line in the script tell us that “Everything will be alright in the end and if it isn’t alright, it isn’t the end”. Boy George sang in the 80’s “Time won’t give me time…”. Time is something we all talk about but never value enough. Fifty years ago we probably had less time as everything took longer but people still had the very same 24 hours in a day. The brew was on a slow boil. Like all good relationships or ‘courting’, as it was known back then.
I think if we taught young people that timing is everything, a lot of ‘time’ would be saved worrying, wondering and pontificating instead of enjoying what we have. Worry, stress and fear don’t change anything and they make you sick. Nor do they make something happen any quicker or better. And the gnat attention span that we all seem to favour fuels our headless chicken approach to life, love, play and business.
Going back to a food theme (and I have to tell you that one of my teachers at Junior School often commented that my stories were excellent but that I always talked about food!!) you can’t make a cake without the right ingredients or if the oven isn’t at the right temperature. Bottom line, everything is about timing, just like the film ‘Sliding Doors’, with which I can relate in many ways.
Having been diagnosed with Cancer this year, it may be that I have become more pragmatic, hence this muse about ‘time’. But even when my parents died, I wasn’t angry and I didn’t question why. It was simply ‘their time’. Time is something we can’t bring back or move forward. It just is. Acceptance is a very difficult state for us humans.
From children desperate to be older to older people who are desperate to be younger. Or people who say they are too busy to exercise or take time for themselves. Time is a precious commodity and we never best utilise it until the final full-stop is staring us in the face. What drives me mad is people who waste my (precious) time. There is no price tag on time. And you can’t trade it in for anything else.
Given stats on how much time people waste on social media (and I include myself in this statistic) why is it that we find time for this but can’t or don’t, for perhaps, more interactive or proactive activities? Agreed, messing about on Facebook and Twitter is fun, gets the adrenalin going and makes you feel engaged with people around the world but we are always detached, at a distance – as the hands of the clock turn.
And here I am asking you to read my blog and take out time of your precious day. For that I thank you and I hope it was time well spent. The next time you have a boiled egg, consider how valuable each second was to the end result and bloody take the time to enjoy it!