As a kid growing in 90s, one of the most inseparable part of our schooling was this subject on ‘Moral Science’ which while felt unnecessary then but today feels like the most important ingredient of overall personal growth and character building. Spread across several years, it touched upon some of the key facets of a rewarding life, internally and externally. One of them was Time & Value.
What the chapter broadly said could be summarized as – “However busy we are, we always end up finding time for things or people we value”. Value here is the operative word and not love or affection or even desire, which is so profound all these years later when I think about it. People who I truly value; my default setting just embraces them in a capsule where they have an almost unlimited access to my time. Yes I do have my zones that require long spells of concentrated focus on other things such as work or well-being or even vocations but when the call is placed by these people on me, I usually just clear out all the bandwidth intuitively and re-divert my attention back to them. Sometimes this backfires badly but rarely has it not gone a step ahead towards making the relationships stronger and more loving.
Why this line of thought now? Because due to something imperceptible lately, I realized that while this is a shade that’s been ingrained into my subconscious for decades, there are times when either I trip on it or I get extremely uncomfortable if someone else errs on it, mostly knowingly. Somehow, over decades, the tacit value of relationships has gone down substantially and there is a sense of shallowness that has crept-in the very way people engage with each other. Somehow it has become acceptable to not find time for relationships and still call them being valued. This is an anti-thesis to the entire logic of how it should be in a well-meaning world. In a well-meaning world, we attempt to understand people by investing in them and then bet long term on them. The only logical explanation of this aberration could be the fact that maybe people are no longer sure whether if the aforementioned relationship is for keeps or not. Maybe they do not have the concept of ‘leap of faith’ anymore wherein at times we do not have the full journey mapped ahead of us and still choose to pursue that path because as Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena ji said – “लीक पर वो चलें जिनके चरण दुर्बल और हारे हैं; हमें जो हमारी यात्रा से बनें, ऐसे अनिर्मित पंथ प्यारे हैं”. And in my opinion this quest is the most wonderful thing about the journey. What fun in knowing everything about someone before travelling together? Some journeys are more about the road than the destination.
Nevertheless, circling back to the original chain of thought, however busy one is, it is important to find time for those who we value. Life is all about the choices we make and our people; we should choose carefully and then keep choosing them every single day.
