TIME OUT FOR A GREAT COME BACK

It’s been a long time that I published on this platform, over a year precisely. Many of my friends and colleagues over the time I went silent did reached out, inquiring about the sudden silence; and most often my response to them is “I am simply taking a time out to refill”.

Ours is a busy generation, a fast-paced hundred-meter-like generation where slowing down is against the grain.  Hence we often miss the little, detail and beautiful things of life. We are mostly overwhelmed by the feeling of lagging and/or lacking behind and it seems as if every day is a fresh rat race to catch up with life. 

Socrates, the great ancient Greek philosopher is popular known for this dictum: “an unexamined life is not worth living”. Congruent with this therefore, to make sense of life, to savour the beauty of every passing moment and to appreciate the unfolding of life’s events, there is the need to occasionally retreat and withdraw from the crowd, the helter-skelter and hurly-burly of life so as to evaluate, examine and take a stock of how far and well you have come in life.  Our failure to do this makes us to just go through the motion of life without leaving a scratch on the sand of time.

Productivity should not be confused and mixed up with being busy, just as efficacy shouldn’t be confused with being engaged in so many activities. Sadly, this is what our time specializes at doing. We chock ourselves up with so many things and get busy doing this and that thinking they will bring high return. However these stem out of the fact that we hardly or barely create time intentionally to look at our lives from another point of views.

I am a lover of sport, football in particular. In a typical football game there is always a time out, professionally known as ‘the half time’. This time out usually last for 15 minutes, during which each opposing team has the opportunity to refresh physically, be instructed understandably by the head coach, assess their performance constructively an plan on the next course of action strategically. These few minutes of recess avail them the privilege to see their entire game from a different eye, to also analyze their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities as well as their threats.

Life is not different from the illustration given about football above; just that here, with the right understanding and mindset, there is no such thing as ‘head you win and tail you lose’. Rather, life offers us the leveled play ground to either win or learn. In our winning in life, we do so through little victories that may seem insignificant but in real sense count, and in moments that we feel we are losing it all, we are learning to be better and more experienced people for what lies ahead. 

However, in the rush of our generation, where the traffic is ever clustering and the raucousness of life deafened our sense of reasoning and make us lose the wonder and beauty of life, permit me to ask you these few soul searching questions: when last did you take a time out to have a fresh look at your life? When was the last time you retreated from the fierceness of the battle of life to re-strategize? Can you remember the last time you enjoyed stillness to refill?

Scan through history and you will gather significant information and facts about men and women who blazed through history meaningfully as men and women who occasionally took a time out to assess, evaluate and examine their lives as well as to determine their next course of action. These men and women knew what it meant to be productive, relevant and impactful and could not confused those with dabbling into many activities.

Unfortunately, our generation is full of energy that we often see, solitude, stillness to think and plan is an old fashion and an unproductive tactics. Hence it is often hard for a young man full of energy or a young lady full of zeal to stay away from the crowd, all alone to see his or her life from a different perspective. I must say this, because we hardly create time to be with ourselves, we are not more than strangers to ourselves. Could this be the reason why we easily get tired and burn out? Could this answer why we easily get swayed from life’s purpose and wonder off course?

What I am trying to say in essence is this, don’t put off living trying to pursue a life that don’t want to be caught. Live every moment purposefully, take every step with determination and make every move in faith. When you feel as if you are going nowhere fast, when it seems as if everything is all clustering and appearing fuzzy, when you feel exhausted and all burn out, you never can tell, a deliberate, intentional and purposeful time out may just be the stroke that will break the camel’s back.

You deserve the best out of life and God sure wants you to make the best out of it as well. So live each day purposefully, savour every moment, grow, love learn, and when you feel tired, exhausted, beat up and burn out, take a time out to be with yourself, and your maker to refreshed, and then afterwards, give life another purposeful shot.

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