Monday 30 December 2013

How to Make the Year Count in 24 Hours

As a secondary school student in the 90s, the Year 2000 looked very far away and mythical. Songs and ideas were created around this extraordinary year. The new millennium became a regular feature in everyday conversations, movies, books, news contents etc. It looked look it’d indeed birth a newly evolved human race.
The Year 2000 came, and in less than 48 hours, some of the children born that year will be celebrating or getting ready to celebrate their 14th birthday. It is hard to imagine that that mythical year has since come and we are some 14 years on the right side of its X axis.

How did 2000 change to 2001, 2002…2007 and now we’d be writing 2014! This to me is crazy and Time is certainly up to some pranks. Where have all these years gone?

That is close to the question many will be asking when December 2014 arrives, “where have all these months gone?” Just look at 2013, it started like it would take a while to get to February as January dragged, then February eventually came and it looked like March wouldn’t come early enough, and just as one was asking “what month is it?” December 2013 was the answer and you had to wonder if 2013 was in a race to be the fastest year ever. Time certainly plays pranks on one. Maybe it doesn’t, maybe we are the ones who play these pranks on ourselves.

Many of us take things with levity believing it is a New Year; some of us draft resolutions at the beginning to guide us through the year. Most of those are broken before the ides of January. Why would anyone wait till the January of a New Year to correct a fault they saw needed correcting the previous year?

It certainly must have everything to do with us thinking some months are more important than the others or that some days are better suited for certain things than the other. That, of course, is not true, as each day has the same potential for greatness and disaster. It is all in the 24 hours. The difference is what we give into each one. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it up when he said, "shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

As 2014 dawns, we must understand that it is not the beginning of anything new, and save an opportunity to mark our days, life is a continuum. The first day of the year has no better value than the two hundredth day. The value is in what we put into it and the opportunities we are able to recognize and maximize. It is very fine to write goals and targets for each year at the end of another but those who set daily goals and meet them are more likely to achieve their yearly goals than those who wait till the last week of December to set their big goals for the New Year.

Success is in the details. We are better off celebrating the dawn of a new day than that of a New Year. That is not to say you should spare the chickens on New Year’s Day. One is only saying, until we learn to see the value and power in 24 hours, we will never truly appreciate the essence of a year.

It felt creepy as the tick of the clock got louder as this line got written. The movement of time never stops and it never slows or even hastens, it just moves forward. That sound is the indication of one more second added to one’s time on this aged planet and one more second taken away from one’s scheduled time here.

As many Nigerians troop to the religious houses for the “cross over” prayers, one needs to remind them that those prayers will never be enough. As long as we don’t understand the value of a day, we’d never truly maximize the value of a year. When 2014 starts, our obsession should not be about having a great year; it should be about each day that makes the year. If you make each day count, the year would naturally count. Happy New Day!

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