Time and Relationships

The more I think about it, the more it seems time is our most valuable commodity.  How a person spends his time is ultimately definitive for him, demonstrating what he finds most important in life.  It's trite, but true, that you never get any of your spent time back.  Once your day is gone, it's gone and never coming back.

When it comes to relationships, the value of time is even more of a stark reality.  To date someone is to state, by your actions, that you find the other person worth spending time on, that it is worth investing your time into a relationship with that person.  Though money may come into it, the ultimate chance you're taking is with your most valuable resource: time.

Put that way, it seems like quite a risk, doesn't it?  You might spend time pursuing someone who doesn't, in the end, fit in with your life.  On the other hand, you can never know if a potential relationship will work without, well, actualizing it: spending time with the other person.  The moment you realize that spending time with the person is not how you want to use your time is the moment you know to end the relationship.

Speaking of the ends of relationships, there's a saying that time heals all wounds.  I think this saying is misleading.  What you choose to do with your time may or may not contribute toward healing.  Letting time pass can certainly be a way of getting distance, but relying on time itself to do some magical healing work is silly.  To heal wounds requires acceptance, reflection, prayer, and counsel--and investing time into these actions is a worthy goal.  Time on its own, however, is just a vessel.

It's easy enough to say, unthinkingly, that we simply "don't have time" for everything we need to do.  Maybe there's even some truth to that statement.  If our time is so limited, how can we possibly hope to accomplish all the goals that seem to be within reach, to be appropriate for us?  The best time-management advice I have seen says that the solution is to prioritize: to make the truly important things the ones that we first spend our time on, and then let the less-important things shake themselves out.  To do that requires a deliberation on what we find most important and what our priorities truly are, rather than a reactive mode of action that has us spending time based on habit or urgency.  It's difficult.  I prefer to think, though, that we will always have enough time.  We have time to be happy, to pray and be with God, to love and be loved, to work hard and take our rest.