Moments to Live : Now or Never

By: Mudit Aggarwal

Our present depends on two parameters – time and action. If any one of these is missed, we feel stone cold and left out. The present we live in is a precious stone. Maria Edgeworth once said “If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves”. This means that we need to do only one job to fructify our coming days, weeks, months or even years – act in the present within perfect timing so that our future is ensured. Time can be a factor for one person or a feeling for another. It can be an elixir of life for someone or a poison that can engulf our lives for someone else. It formed all our countries, our planets, the galaxies and even our God(s) and action is something used similarly by Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Adi Shankaracharya, Gautam Buddha , Prophet Mohammad and Mother Teresa. They were not given time as a complimentary gift to perform miracles in other’s lives. They acted at the right time and at the right place, knowing that thinking of the past and the future could be detrimental to their present thoughts and actions. If you say time is too short, if you feel life is worthless and the moments given to you to act in are like a dry lake, then just think of those heroes who used the short term of life given, to enlighten paths in other’s lives. How often do we think that if people like Bhagat Singh, Joan of Arc, Henry Mosely and Bruce Lee were given longer lives, they would have performed miracles by their sheer excellence in their respective fields? These people are like those small yet mesmerizing books that have changed our lives – be it The prophet by Khalil Gibran or The Communist Manifesto by Marx, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho or The Short Stories by Leo Tolstoy. If we cannot learn from human examples, we can look at nature. Mayflies are aquatic insects that have a life span of 1 day, but they live every moment given to them by God. They relish their lives contributing richly to nature’s bounty. For as T.S Eliot wrote in his poem The dry Salvages (1941):

“On whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death- that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others ”.