Time. As we become more mature we perceive that this is the most considerable reserved supply we have received from God. We can't unmistakably 'save time' as if we could place it in a Piggy Bank and use it again later. No - we simply need to take control of our time, every second, every minute, every hour. But if we do this we will be rewarded in ways we've never imagined before...
Probably similar to most children, I grew up with a sense that time was endless. It was a waterfall that would drop from the top of a mountain and disappear into the river beyond, never stopping for a moment, just simply splashing down in a huge, kind stream. Living on a farm where life was very much in sync with nature, the seasons contributed to this sense of time being something that would carry on forever.
Dream Interpretation Teeth
My parents worked with time, but in fully separate ways: my mother all the time looking another creative or charitable activity to squeeze into her day, my father choosing to generously lavish his time on other people. Once I started school, my own time was punctuated by the bell ringing in the small, rural boarding school where I spent the greater part of my childhood. This was and remains to date one of the most idyllic places to grow up: situated on a farm in the lush, green area of northern KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. All the children of the German-speaking farming society in that singular part of the country were dropped off by their parents after church on Sundays and collected again by a parent lift-club five days later. In between, the days were marked by the ringing of a hand-held bell. The first bell meant rolling out of a warm bed onto a cold floor and saying your morning prayers. The next one meant getting up, making your bed, brushing your teeth and washing your face and getting dressed. The third one meant running barefoot over the sharp, crystal gravel to the Religious study classroom, where the Pastor was waiting to hear if you had done your homework and learnt the considerable Bible verses and hymns off by heart. The fourth one meant running to the dining hall for breakfast. And so the enthralling sound of the bell trained us to act on the rhythm of time, until the final bell at night. This meant 'lights out' and was the signal for all eight wee girls in my dormitory to forgive one another and ask one another for forgiveness for the day's sins and hurting and fall into a deep and very peaceful sleep.
Very rarely, our joyful games playing tennis or 'catch' or making clay figurines from the silky level red earth after it had rained, our day suddenly would be disrupted by the deep, sonorous sound of the church bell. This all the time meant that the time had come for some elderly man or woman to stop living on earth and enter into eternal life to join God in Heaven. But even then, except for awakening a sense of awed sadness in my heart, without unmistakably understanding it, I did not join together that sound with the significance of my own time here on earth.
When I was twelve I had an caress through which I suddenly saw the intrinsic value of time and how it would suddenly sweep past and have a huge impact on my life. In the year before I had been ill with an acute kidney infection, which the physician had ascribed to going fishing barefoot too often (which I, in fact, had never done!). I'd recovered well, but was now again complaining of pain in my lower abdomen. My mom was worried that it might be a recurrence of the kidney infection and off to the physician we went. This time his determination was different. When he failed to detect anything wrong with me, he terminated that this pain was probably the beginning of my first menstrual period: of my changing from a child to a woman. In the flash of an instant I understood what this meant: it meant that the end of my idyllic childhood was about to come... It meant that that I would have to be all grown-up and responsible and that my mother and father would grow old and die... all would change! For my young mind that was simply too horrible to contemplate.
When my mother and I reached the car, I burst into tears. I couldn't express in words the incredible, deep sense of loss that I was feeling, and she was trying to calm me down without success. I think I cried all the way home to the farm and then crept into bed and cried for another join of hours.
The menstruation never started, until I was 18 and my mother took me to the physician because she was worried that again there was something wrong with me. By then, I was emotionally ready for the bodily change in my body, but I also knew instinctively that this was not a health issue. When I had cried and cried that day, six years before, I had instructed my sub-conscious mind to resist the impact of 'time': I had demanded of it to increase my childhood for as long as I chose.
I'm telling this very personal story for two reasons: I want you to understand that while time keeps on running, we do have the capability to exercise control over both the actual time we have been given, by using it wisely, as well as train our subconscious to help us in achieving our goals.
Sadly, in my case, I only interpreted this chapter in a sure way many, many years later. When I was 18 I simply I felt exhilarated by the fact that I, not time, could settle what would happen to my body and when. And in a sense I think that is also what caused my hugely careless attitude towards time during the years that followed.
When I first left the protected and regimented environment of boarding school life and moved to university and the 'freedom' of choosing what to do with my own time, I came face-to-face with the challenge of never having understood how to exercise self-discipline with regard to time. Without the bell ringing, I conception I had the greatest power. But in reality I was lost. I found it extremely difficult to plan my own day and stick to the time I had allocated to exact activities. In fact, I found it a terrible drag, since my creative mind simply got carried away with anything I was busy with at that point in time.
Interestingly enough, many years later I learnt about the African doctrine of the 'Seven Spirits' that live inside each one of us human beings. For the first time I had a visual image that I could understand unmistakably to construe my lack of time management. Agreeing to antique African tradition, one of the 'Seven Spirits' is the 'Wandering Spirit' - the spirit that possesses anything who is carried away in an obsession of one type or another. Our challenge as human beings is to administrate these spirits (or call it attitudes) that dwell inside us. I needed to administrate the 'Wandering Spirit' inside me.
But during my time as a student I unmistakably did not consciously understand the meaning of 'managing' anything, really! I was in a paradise of new knowledge and caress and on a quest to succeed with wild abandon any new thing that I found enthralling at that stage. Needless to say, this lack of focus resulted in me going through four separate courses of study in six years, at the end of which I - to the great relief of my parents - had ultimately managed to perfect a first degree.
Later, when I became a young entrepreneur and also during the time that I worked in other organizations, I never unmistakably bothered about the significance of keeping time, since I simply went overboard and worked longer hours and harder than anything else nearby me, thereby earning the acclaim of my clients or superiors and with that the dubious 'right' to all the time be a wee late. In fact, at one point in my career, in my early thirties, when I was heading a group within the Office of the Auditor-General of South Africa, and was 15 minutes late for a meeting once again, I responded very cheekily to my grey-suited auditor-colleagues who were grumbling about this: "I may be late, but once I'm here I add more value than all of you combined!"
I now cringe when I think about this arrogance. Fortunately, the guys were very good-natured and just laughed.
Getting to grips with time became an insurmountable challenge during the past join of years, when I tried to join serving a extremely demanding consulting client with rescuing a drowning, rural non-profit organization, growing an own book publishing business and - to top it all - doing all this from two separate places that were based four hours of driving apart! I ended up feeling like a ping-pong ball, which was banged nearby at the will of the separate parties I was serving: clients, international donors and accident issues at the non-profit, and employees in the publishing business. As long as I had the cashflow from my consulting business, I could somehow keep this mad pace going. But when suddenly this rug was pulled out from under my feet, the whole house of cards came crashing down...
During the months of introspection that followed, I heard the bells of my childhood ringing in my mind: I simply Had To take charge of my own time! I could no longer allow my time to be at the beck and call of everyone else, or otherwise I would never achieve the goals I had set for myself. But this time round, I was the one who had to settle when the bells should ring.
Fortunately, Providence sent me a teacher to serve as a daily role-model to me: my husband. Nico is an artist of routine and a specialist of habit. He instinctively appreciates the significance of rhythm in daily life. Now, we'd been together for a dozen years, but during these years I all the time had a guess why I would not learn from him: we were simply too separate from one another. In my mind, I saw Nico as being person who was content with the 'little life' of daily habits and routines. I, on the contrary, wanted a life of adventure, excitement, the extra-ordinary and unmistakably no routine. I did not want to be 'held back' by the fetters of time!
It has taken all these years and all these experiences combined, as well as the listening to and reading books by numerous motivational and 'how to' motivational authors and speakers, to ultimately come to my senses and perceive that the only way to become a specialist in any field is to specialist yourself first. And that means mastering - among other things - your time. Just like Nico already did.
So:-
- if you're also plagued by the 'Wandering Spirit' that draws your attentiveness away from the here and now 'on the wings of inspiration' to anything has caught your fancy at that singular point in time, or
- if you've become a play ball in the hands of others, being thrown nearby based on their needs, day and night,
then, dear friend, I recommend that you do the wise thing and learn from your own and my mistakes and personally take control over your time.
One technique which I picked up from one of the coaches I have been working with, is to draw up a program for every day of the week and then use my mobile phone alarm as a 'bell' to mark the time when 'time's up' for one activity and when I need to start with the next one, regardless if the first one has been completed. It simply will have to wait for the next duration of time allocated to it. I now feel as if I have my own, personal 'bell ringer' in my pocket to help get me into a routine of habits that will set the scene for my greatest success!
Another technique I've learnt is to survey and adopt the habits of the person who has achieved what you want to achieve. Your goal may be different, but I realized that if I want to make all the dreams I have come true, I will have to become a billionaire! Now, you probably have heard the 'urban legend' about Billionaire Bill Gates, namely that timewise it would be cheaper for him to continue walking to a meeting, than to stop for a second to pick up a 100 dollar bill that person had lost... At his current worth of 58 Billion Dollars, every second of his time is valued at 29.-
I've never liked the saying 'time is money', and money is not the only guess why you should succeed my (and all victorious people's) example of taking control of your time: scheduling time with your loved ones is worth more than all the money in the world.
But the bottom line is, if you want to be victorious - either this means being a world-class Golf Player, a Millionariess or a Billionairess, you have to start treating your time as if you were hugely victorious already... Adopt the habits of person who already has what you want - person who understands the improbable value of his or her time.
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