Life is precious, make the most of it

TIME has a way of moving quickly.

It seems like only yesterday I was a young man. Today, I am 55.

Where have all the years gone? I know I have lived all the years through a labyrinth of dreams and hopes, hurt and healing, and victories and defeats.

At its most placid, my existence, like everyone else, has been unpredictable and fragile.

Illness, accidents, addiction, errors in judgement and errors in choices.

They are all out there, like boulders in a rapidly flowing river, along with the challenges of love, work and relationships.

I have learned to keep searching my soul for who I am and what I want and to be fearless in making decisions and making every day matter.

As I’ve aged, I’ve become kinder to and less critical of myself. I’ve become my own best friend. I have seen many family and friends leave the living world. I have learned that time is a narcotic for pain.

Either the pain disappeared when it ran its course, or a person learned to live with it.

As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. Being older has set me free. One thing I have discovered in my lifetime with rock-ribbed certainty is that there is a power higher than me.

I’ve learned that in humility, there is strength, a strength that comes from tasting fear, from having flinched, from knowing with certainty that there is a creator who cares and listens.

It is important to achieve self-fulfilment, for when we are about to die, we may realise we have not lived at all.

My life’s experiences remind me that life is precious, and it places a premium on how we use the years we’ve got left.

Perhaps the words of Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) in My Soul Has A Hat, sums up my feelings.

“I counted my years and realised that I have less time to live by than I have lived so far… My time is too short. I want the essence; my spirit is in a hurry… Yes, I’m in a hurry… My goal is to reach the end satisfied and at peace with my loved ones and conscience. We have two lives and the second begins when you realise you only have one.”

KEVIN GOVENDER

Shallcross