University of economics and pedagogy’’

Time is Precious Essay
Time is among the very few things that once lost can never be recovered. Think about it: the average life of a person is just a reservoir of 2.4 billion seconds or 75 years in first world nations, where life expectancy is quite high. The situation is worse in third world nations. So, each passing second our reservoir sheds time, just like in an hour glass.
Unfortunately, most people do not realize how precious time is until in later years of their lives. Money lost can be recovered; trust broken can be amended; opportunity lost can be replaced by another opportunity. However, when time is lost it has gone forever. So, what makes time very precious that we have to make the best out of it?
Ever heard the phrase that “time stands still for no man”? Well, it is as clear as that. Time is always in motion. It does not stop for no one, rich or poor, famous or ordinary, Muslim or Christian, man or woman. Each person is given 24 hours a day to either utilize it or waste it away. Time waits for nobody, but it gives us equal duration to follow our dreams or waste them. Since it cannot be contained, we are only gifted with the power of memory to capture all the great moments that made our lives worthwhile.
Secondly, time is priceless. You have probably heard the saying that “the best things in life are for free”. Same goes with time- it is the best gift that life has to offer us. You cannot put a monetary value to time. You cannot redeem it with any form of money or property. If that were the case, then many wealthy men would have traded their billions of dollars to enjoy more time on this lovely earth.
People actually say that “they are buying time” to mean that they are delaying the inevitable. The truth of the matter is that they are wasting their precious resource not doing something that they will end up doing it in the near future and in the process waste more time.
Furthermore, time can never be recreated, once it is gone it is gone. What if time could be recreated? The concept of risk would be nonexistent. After a failure, loss or mistake, people would just remodel their time in a time travel fashion and go back to amend their mistakes. Time would be at a standstill.
There would be chaos with people going back and forth trying to rectify their errors. Most of the brilliant minds in history would not exist simply because their births were considered errors on their parents’ part. Life would, therefore, be worthless and people would waste it just the same way we waste renewable energy. The irony of it all is that we still waste it, despite time being a very scarce resource.
Also, time can never be borrowed or leased to anyone. Just like a thumbprint, it is uniquely yours. We are given time but in different proportions. Some grow past the century mark, while others do not see the light of the day and come out as miscarriages. The duration of life does not matter, however, because we have no control over it. How we live is what that matters, because we have control over our destiny.
It is the quality of life that matters and not the quantity. There are people who died very young, but lived far much better and fulfilling lives than people who grew to their old ages.
Time depreciates in quantity, but appreciates in value as time goes by. As we age, we realize that we are not invincible and death is always around the corner. It becomes crystal clear that time is a great asset that we have wasted away chasing after things that have no importance at all.
The little time we have left, we try to spend it with people we love. Unfortunately, our loved ones are at their productive stages and they also waste away time pursuing things that have little importance to them. It is worth noting that time appreciates in value, as we grow older because we become wise enough to know that it is a scarce resource that can be depleted any time.
However, for some people, time depreciates in value. This is especially true for people who have done crime and have to do time to atone for their crimes. This time is toxic to them and they just want to do away with it so that they can be free and get back to their normal lives. But, this time is not always bad when you factor in people who may be in need of it, such as criminals on death row waiting to be executed.
Another great example is a person who has wasted the quality of his life doing drugs. Eventually, his lifestyle choices will get to him. His life or rather time is depreciating in value with each passing second. This means that the rate at which our time is depleted is twice as fast for drug users. This is the reason why most of them die younger.
Moreover, time flies and it really flies fast while you are thinking of primitive things as doing your essay on time. Firstly, you are in baby diapers, the next minute you are in adult diapers. Some waste it away watching television and fantasizing about movie stars. Others waste it away doing things that are detrimental to their spiritual, economic, physical, emotional and social wellbeing.
Yet others waste their time waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Unbeknownst to them, opportunities rarely come and it is up to us to create them. Opportunities do not come flying through the window. You have to be in the nick of things, doing something meaningful and that is when an opportunity will arise.

Make most of your time and you will be rewarded ten folds of it, waste it and the little you have will be taken away, just like in the parable of talents. People make excuses that they just don’t have time to do something- maybe to visit their friends or loved ones or to go to that vacation that they have been postponing for the last six years or it may be a workout regimen that they told themselves they would pursue.
But, they never seem to have time to do them, as they continuously tell themselves. The truth of the matter is that there is time for everything, how we plan or fail to plan our time is the problem. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. This is actually true for time.

There is time for everything. There is time for work, study, eating, sleeping, relaxing, playing, praying, vacations etc. Failure to plan our life makes it seem scarce, when it is actually enough to do whatever we want to do. We have 24 hours in a day, yet there are individuals who are far much busier than us, yet still find the right balance to have a happy life.
The secret is how they plan their lives. They wake up earlier than most of us. Utilize the early morning hours doing something constructive like working out. After work in the evening, they rush to play with their kids, have family dinner and dedicate sometime for their wives. Then, they spend maybe an hour reducing some work log, before hitting the sack. Weekends are strictly for family and friends and each year, they have to go for vacations.
If someone wants to visit or do something for you, they will always find or create time. If they say that they didn’t have time, it means that you are not a priority to them. Why should they waste their time doing stuff for you, when they can use it to watch their favorite television shows?
Eventually, years slip away and we are unable to do whatever we planned to do. We realize how precious our loved were when it is too late. Our concept of time is skewed to the wrong side. We assume there is plenty of it and just procrastinate through it, just like how we do assignments. We do nothing for the most part of it and as the deadline approaches, we are knocked out of our hinges trying to beat them.
That’s the approach that many embrace in life, not knowing that we have only one life to live. The best approach would be to do heavy tasks while we are young and as we grow older, the intensity and heaviness of the work should be reduced. The reality is that we do less work and more fun while we are young and then try to recover all the wasted time when we age.
The slogan that many youths have adopted is YOLO, which basically stands for You Only Live Once. While you would assume that it is an initiative by our young adults to make the best out of their time, they actually use it as an excuse to waste their lives partying, doing drugs and overindulging in sexual activities.
Do not assume that I’m pro-work with no fun type of a person. Fun is actually the best way to relieve work related stress, but it should be done in moderation. Too much work is bad for our health.