Time is An Illusion

Source : Eugene Loh, A Slice of Life, 938LIVE, a station of MediaCorp Radio

When we're feeling lousy or sad, we tend to forget that life does not go on forever. That every moment is an opportunity for love, knowledge, compassion, creation, and joy, and once gone, can never be retrieved. We are too fixated with the past and all its "could have"s and "should have"s, squander our precious present by feeling sorry for ourselves, and imagine a future that may not come to pass!
We've all been brought up to believe that time is quantity - 60 seconds make up one minute, 60 minutes make up an hour, 24 hours make up a day. But the meaning of time varies from person to person and from context to context.
Time is an illusion, a phantom, a delusion if you will. This moment is gone before I am finished saying "this moment". This 'moment' will virtually never exist! Time is not a thing, it has no substance...you can't touch it, you can't feel it, it cannot imprison you.
We should know not the quantity of our life, or our time spent on this earth - but we should value the quality of our life. Time by itself has no meaning - we have to give it meaning via our thoughts and actions.
There is so much happiness out there waiting for you. And there are plenty of people who can benefit from the joy you will bring them. You may now feel very lonely, and sad, and it may seem quite possible that you will never experience joy, love, spontaneity and fun again. Which is, of course, a most absurd thought. Don't worry, it's just the grief talking? the withdrawal, the initial disbelief and dejection.
It is never too late. Very often, when we lose something valuable to us, we think it's too late to salvage things, to express our love, to show our appreciation. What we fail to realise is that we have ample opportunities to do this with other people we love, and the ones we will come to love!
I urge you not to waste another moment of your life - you'll never get it back.

Author’s comment:
After reading it, I continue to waste my time still… sighz they always said 忠言逆耳利于行. And I can actually stare in blank space for about an hour to two.

I think the ghost of past came looking for me recently, asking me to evaluate life. First was my dm telling me about a bike accident that had happened (on Sunday actually and not Monday as I think I had originally mentioned). And I questioned the impatience of human beings.

Then the earthquake which left an impact on me. The weirdest thing about this earthquake is the fact that today I had taken an old copy of digital life (Mar 13 2007) to read and it was on the Sumatra earthquake that had happened on Mar 7. And while scanning through their blogosphere, I read a paragraph of someone thinking that the earthquake was a ghost shaking the dad. Weird, did someone had the same encounter my dad had? I took a look at the link and got a shock. When did my blog appear on the paper… yikes! (Luckily nobody reads it haha.) And 6 months later, on a very significant day for me, I had actually experienced the tremors.

I asked why. Because I was in Tokyo when there was an earthquake but I did not felt the tremor. Because this article reminded me how I had chided my dad from thinking it is a ghost. And yet when I experienced it, I realized it is no laughing matter. It may have been very mild compared to what the victims experienced, but it indicated how fragile a human’s life is.

And today, a fire had occurred taking away 2 lives. Accident at work is a big taboo in my workplace as we emphasis greatly on Safety. To have 2 lives lost is a big issue. I thought about their family abroad, how hard they came here to work, how much they slog here, and how sad it is to have died in a foreign land with no closest kin.

Time waits for no man. Makoto Konno, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, taught me that. Her aunt said she’s the type who will run towards the thing rather than wait. That’s why she is always leaping around. She keeps going back to the past and redoing her stuff. But with each change, she realizes she caused different impact on the people around her. With each history rewrote, others were hurt instead of her. No matter how she tried to help, it will only get worst. 天机不可泄漏. How true.