In my previous blog posts, I have talked about time in a blog post called "The Brick". Another blog post talks about "Effort - Good or Bad". Both talk about how much time man can waste in life. Time is very important. We spend a third our lives sleeping.
Since writing both posts, time is such a critical issue that I once again feel the need to address it for myself. I can look back over the course of a year and say I have had little to no success in becoming more effective in my affairs. I have been more, "In Loss" with time.
The title of this post is "Time: Your Life's Pattern (Life Intelligence)". You may wonder why I have chosen such a title. What do I mean by "Your Life's Pattern" and "Life Intelligence"? Let me explain.
There is a job role that I have been seeking to get for a while and its in the area of Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence is the field in computing whereby a company will look into all its operations (through databases), analyse the data and try guiding the business decisions they make. So for example, a supermarket could not be selling anything of a particular product as much as they would like, and so this might show up as a trend across the country. Given such information, they can make the decision to remove such a product. This is an extremely simple piece of analysis. But the key is that the analysis is done over time.
Now, in the same way we can evaluate data with business intelligence, we can evaluate our life in the activities we do over time. The question I have is, what is your life pattern, what does the trend say, where does the time get spent, does the trend show ineffective use of time and missed opportunities or does it show how effective you are.
We all have goals. We all have hopes. Its a matter of taking action to walk towards that what we want. I have goals. Though I have to be clear about this to myself. My goals are not clear cut. My ultimate non phased goal is to end my life with the Kalimah. But what about the small and large goals that need to be addressed in our short life?
Take a look at how you have spent your days and nights for the last 6 months. Have they been useful, do you feel as though you have achieved what you want? If you are wasting time getting absolutely nowhere, then clearly the decision has to be made to correct the path. In Islam, we will account for time, and so we are told to account for our deeds and time spent before we are held accountable.
Sometimes I think for the amount of time wasted, you are better off taking risks in life trying to do something even if it ends up failing. Also if you analyse the time wasted, what does time wasted actually mean. It could mean you end up failing at the very things you chase with your effort that have little or no value in your life. From this perspective, you have failed at your actual goals as well as your invaluable ones. The invaluable ones can be entertaining yourself too much, always being lazy, or sinning for example.
If you read my blog, you will know I am a boxing fan. I recently saw a press conference from a boxer, Paulie Malignaggi, who I am quite a fan of (in both boxing ability and ring commentary). He said in the conference leading up to the fight with Sam Eggington, that he spent a few years waiting around for the big fights and living his life waiting around for them. He said when your young your always in a rush thinking you don't have time when in fact you have all the time in the world. He said his approach is to just enjoy the moment and really capture the now and leave what happens till it comes.
Excellent words from Paulie really remind you about how the day to day approach should be, not discounting the long term goals, but really just living the "moment" and making it as effective as possible.
I suppose I have to really make my life decisions based on how much time I waste. Time is effectively leaking out the bucket with a hole. What we need to address is, watching time and really capturing the moment before it heads out of the hole, so we can definitely say yes, I spent that portion well, I spent that day well, I spent that month and year well. We don't really want to regret our life on time wasted. If our efforts got put into our goals more, at least we tried right?
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