New Year is the year of new dreams, new plans, and new resolutions. It is the time when the heart overflows with fresh waves of enthusiasm, and there arises the ambition to attain new heights. The New Year implies – a new beginning. The celebration at this time is all about crossing the past year and taking our steps forward on the threshold of the coming one. This is also the time for self-analysis when we should review what we have achieved in the past and what the future may unfold. What are our goals, and what are the plans and methodologies to achieve these goals?
While the past year is a collection of memories of joys and sorrows and successes and failures, the New Year is coming with the hope of unknown pleasant and unpleasant experiences. All of us have expectations and aspirations from the New Year. But they cannot be fulfilled unless we adopt an efficient and restrained lifestyle. In order to lead a balanced and disciplined life, it is essential to understand the meaning of time.
The concept of the time is complex. There is no starting or ending point of time cycle. We, humans, divide the time into three parts – past, present, and future, but the time cycle is undivided. Maharshi Veda Vyasa elucidates it as follows – ‘The time cycle is revolving like the wheels of chariot. It makes the nights gradually darker in the period of waning moon, and makes them brighter from new moon to full moon day. Without the flow of time, winter, summer, and the rainy season would not come; Sun will not rise and set. All creatures die when the time is ripe. No one is spared by time, but the realization /understanding of time is helpful in all the endeavours of life.
Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in ‘The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings’ writes – “…it becomes clear that chronometric time is a homogeneous succession lacking all particularity. It is always the same, always indifferent to pleasure or pain. Mythological time, on the other hand, is impregnated with all the particulars of our lives: it is as long as the eternity or as short as a breath, ominous or propitious, fecund or sterile.”
Time never waits for anyone. How many new years have passed before us? Now is the time to think about how can we make the best utilization of this year so that it may bestow on us the gift of achievements? It is essential for people of all ages and all walks of life to make plans for moving forward and creating new paths.
Denis E. Waitley, an American writer, says – Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.
“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instil in us. – Hal Borland”
Source: Akhand Jyoti Magazine Jan-Feb 2020