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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

How time flies... Yet how do we use it?

There is no denying that people tend to waste the greatest asset that they have, “time”. Although men dream about time travel, it is most likely nothing but fantasy and there is no way to go back. Discovery.com recently posted news regarding this, reporting that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel impossible, opposite to the sci-fi movies and books which are written about it. Whether this is true or not, there is still room for debate. But nevertheless, for the time being, time is ticking, passing us by, and nobody can give it back to us.

The one second that just passed will never ever be returned. It’s gone, and we have either benefited from it, or wasted it. We ourselves know better about how we spend our time. Furthermore, all of us have our criteria for what is wasteful and what is beneficial. And I think it’s a good idea to reexamine the things that we do and categorize them once again.

In the Qur’an, God talks extensively about time. In fact, as it having a beginning, it will also have an end. And the end of time of this ephemeral world is pictured vividly in the Islamic tradition, where people will be in the state of confusion. So horrifying will the end of time be, the mother will forget about her suckling baby, and the pregnant women will literally drop what they are conceiving. The end of time for those who do not experience this horrific day is the time of death. Through death, we will be separated from our current perception of time, and experience it in a whole new way.

But it’s not enough to only be horrified by what will happen. Rather, we need to get our act straight and be prepared for it. In truth, the norm is, every effort that we do is wasteful, EXCEPT the efforts that we do for good deeds, advising people towards justice, patience, and every other thing that supports these matters, while accompanying them with faith. Only by committing ourselves towards avoiding all that are wasteful will we truly become people who appreciate time. And indeed one day, we will all see the fruits of what we worked for, whether they were truly beneficial for us or not.

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