Sometimes we don’t realise how precious life is. We don’t seem to have the brains to wonder about how short life is and how time has too much value to waste.

All the clocks in the world can stop working abruptly, but time waits for nobody. No matter where, no matter what, the clocks all over planet earth keep ticking away. Tick tock, tick tock.

Do we leave things that need to be done now, today, tomorrow but actually never get done? Are we sometimes too lazy to use time well and prefer to dilly dally instead of seeing our elderly parents who reside in an old folk’s home? Are we often prone to put off doing something important time after time, when we have no guarantee that we will even wake up alive and well in the morning?

Do we avoid meeting with the person we argued with and know with a certainty that we were in the wrong just because the word “sorry” seems to waste a lot of our time and energy?

Time needs to be valued carefully – time for yourself, time to build a relationship with God and time to develop good relationships with others. Time is too precious to waste. The only time we are allowed to just sit and stare can still be of great value. As the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “Happiness is like a butterfly which you run after but can never catch… But if you sit down pensively and in a serene position, it might come to rest on your knees. We have been to the moon and back, invented computers, mobiles etc but we can never capture time in a bottle.”

Valerie Borg

Valletta