I don’t have time…
I can’t make it…
I should’ve done it when I could…
I wish I had, but I never did…
I’ve said or thought about these phrases thousands of times in my 22 years of existence and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I suppose that all of us have at some point let time slip by, not realizing the impermanence of moments, but also of our own lives.
There has always been that dream, the very important – or not so important – goal that we wanted to achieve at the first chance we got some time. But when the time came, we let it go by without doing what we so much desired. Why?
Humans don’t recognize how temporary we are. We often choose, whether that is consciously or not, to ignore how fleeting our lives are. We are terrified at the thought that nothing lasts forever, and that all situations have an expiration date. We believe that we will be given second or third chances for what we want to do, so when we get the first chance we let it pass us by.
Indeed, sometimes we may have multiple chances or we may be lucky enough to try again for what we want another time. This is of course the optimistic scenario.
Unfortunately, we don’t get a second chance for everything. So, we end up wishing we could go back in time to go on that trip we didn’t, to seize that professional opportunity we were so afraid of, to take risks when we could. But also, for more important things. We wish we’d had more time to say I love you again to our loved ones or we hadn’t left that conversation with our friends in the middle thinking we’d have more time to continue it in the future or we’d hugged one more time our grandmother and grandfather, whom we didn’t know we would see for the last time.
As N. told us, “I am generally a person who adopts the motto don’t regret whatever you do. Still, if I could go back in time—always keeping the future in mind—I might have been able to say goodbye to my grandmother before she died. In her last days, she kept asking for me and I couldn’t visit her due to my private tutoring classes schedule. I guess I made the common human mistake of taking everything in my life for granted.”
Accordingly, M. also told us “I would tell my friends that I love them more often, because you never know what your last moment with a person will be.”
Life is about moments and if there’s one thing we should always remember, it’s that there’s no better time than now. If we reflect on how much time we let go by because we thought there would always be a moment later, and if we realize how much we took for granted, only then will we have the strength we need to get one step closer to what we dream of doing, to what we want or what we desire.
Certainly, we will regret some of the choices and risks. But if we don’t try, how will we know? In the end, it’s better to regret doing something than to regret letting time roll by without taking advantage of it as you wanted, filling your mind with unanswered “what ifs” and questions about how things might have turned out in a “parallel universe”.
As Virgil said fugit inreparabile tempus, that is, time flies irretrievably. So, seize every moment and opportunity given, and try to do as much as you can now and not later.
So, I will conclude with R.’s answer when she was asked what she would do differently if she could go back in time. “I would have been more patient. Sometimes we feel that time runs fast and leaves us behind, while by being patient, we don’t reduce the quality of our moments, and we do not “waste” our time in fictitious and repulsive scenarios.”
