Time and Tide waits for no man....

Twenty five days of the year 2002 just gone by. Soon I also realised that in a few months time, I will be celebrating my 25th wedding anniversary! How time really flies.....and two of my kids are already young adults. Like it or not, I already started joining the POP group of my neighbourhood as their youngest member.( POP is a Malay acronym for Persatuan Orang Pencen).

To-day I had lunch with my peers at Restoran Haji Dollah,Jalan Munshi Abdullah, Melaka. All of us realised that we do not have many years more to go. In fact, I drew a demographic curve taken from Fortune magazine about life expectancy of those at the age of 50 for Malaysians. The probability for us to reach 60 years of age is 50% and and to live up to 78 years old is only 2%. It is quite scary considering the probable number of years left we may be able to stay alive.

Two weeks ago I attended the a lecture on project management at BATC,UTM KL. The speaker talked  about the life equation. He said that we started with being born, educated,matured, worked and then we all will die. According to him, the first and the last are beyond our control, but we have the choice to live our life in between the two constants. IMHO, sometimes we may not have the luxury to make a choice due to certain circumtances that are beyond our controls.

Whatever it is, my friends and me are grateful that we are still living as compared to those who were younger but they died earlier. The question that begs the answer is how  we are going to live the  rest of our life. As said by the wise men, it is not the number of years that we lived  but what we had put in the years of our life. Life is actually a journey; if we do not know where we are going, any road will take us there.( God knows where). It is good to slow down a bit,turn back and see which road we have travelled and know where we are before we continue with journey. The longer we are on the road, the more bags and luggages  we carry. It is advisable to look at what we have gathered and see whether we really need them as we move along. And at the same time, we may consider exchnage them with more  important things for our needs when we reach our destination.

When we were teenagers in the mid-60's, we have our own share of 'pop' culture- we called it 'pop ye ye'. We had our own fun with music etc but we were lucky not to be bombarded with drug and other black or yellow cultures faced by the youths of to-day. Thanks God we had less choice and limited accessibilty to bad behaviours and cultures. In the present IT- enabled world, everything travels at the speed of electrons and the issue of making the right choice is critical to the success or failure of one's life.

We are making  choices everyday in our life, irrespective of our age. The only difference is where are we and what matters to us at that point in time. As of now, I have chosen to write this article instead of going to sleep. Our  life is mainly what we do with the time available to us. Time is a commodity that most people simply waste it away every second as if they have all the time in the world. The saying, time is gold is just a cliche'. Just watch the young as well as the old waste their time away every where and everyday.....

Lately, I am very concerned about time when my schoolmate passed away due to high blood pressure. He was only 50! And three weeks ago, my cousin just got a heart attack and died on the same day. He was only 41!

By the way, what is time? I am no Prof. Stephen Hawking to define what it is in the field of Theoritical Physics. However in my personal dictionary, time is like an opportunity. If it is not taken, it just goes away and I am the loser.Since all of us prefer to be the winners, let's do something useful with it. Don't wait-do it now whatever that really matters to you.