Question: In adulthood, a person begins to realize that his time is limited. He looks back and analyzes how much he has managed to do with his life and whether there is still time to change anything.
According to sociological studies, people cease to worry about their future from the age of 65 and devote their thoughts to memories of the life they have lived.
This is due to fear of the future, the unknown, the uncertainty of death, and of our temporary existence. What is your perspective regarding the issue of our limited life and how should we relate to time correctly?
Answer: Time is a very concrete concept for us. We don’t feel it so sharply during our childhood, but as a person grows older and becomes an adult, time becomes increasingly more important for him.
As a child grows up, he gradually begins to understand what time is as a result of his connection with the environment. Little children and babies don’t really feel time, but the environment pressures them and places them in frameworks of time: They have to get up on time, to eat on time, to go to school on time, to go back home, and to go to sleep. A child doesn’t want these frameworks, but having no choice he is forced to gradually accept them. Thus, we constantly get used to being in the grip of time.
Then we begin to study and to work and this chases us into frameworks of time even more. We start a family and take even greater responsibility upon ourselves. Eventually time becomes a heavy burden for us that actually enslaves us.
This continues until we retire; as long as we feel chained to time by many different obligations, time is our major policeman, which constantly demands our obedience and our submission, and we must obey it. There is always the option to blame us from the perspective of time: “Where have you been for so long and what have you been doing? When will you get back?” etc.
Even as a child a person feels that time is limited. A child doesn’t want to feel that he is in frameworks of time, but he is constantly demanded to be in them and to adapt to them. For a child it is a problem and he tries to fight time. He wants to play and doesn’t want to be in the grasp of time limited from one point in time to another.
When he grows up and becomes an adult, he begins to realize that it is useless to fight time and that he can only decide how to fill it. Then he begins to run along with time by trying to do his best in the time that he was given. Thus, he values his achievements, and according to this criterion he compares himself to others: How successful he is at his age compared to his peers.
We are in a constant competition. Time traps us in its net and is a heavy burden on our shoulders, thus making us its slaves.
But after the age of 50 a person begins to gradually fade out. He doesn’t have great plans like before. His plans gradually become more modest; he realizes that there must be a balance and that he shouldn’t demand too much of life.
He feels its limitations more and more; he cannot fight time, and his options to fill time become rather limited. Therefore, he prefers to spend more time with his family and hischildren, to rest and to travel.
The concept of time becomes important now from the perspective of how pleasant and comfortable he feels at any point of time. He begins to live in the present more and not the future as he did before.
Therefore, older people become more like children since children also live in the moment.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 4/22/14
[137237]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” 4/22/14
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