Y-Speak: Coming Soon

“TIME wasted is time gone forever,” a preacher once told me.

I was only ten years old when I first heard these words. It was one hot Sunday afternoon, just after our church service, when the pastor approached me and uttered words I did not understand...yet.

Years passed and I was fifteen.

It was our high school graduation ceremony. People were talking about life after high school; where they wanted to go to college, when they would leave town to scout for schools, and of course, how they would miss their friends once the ceremony was over.

Like any other graduation ceremony, we sang a song that symbolizes the end of our journey in high school. While singing, I felt a pang of pain. Tears started to fall, as I slowly realized that things would start to change.

Reality was kicking in. The people I was with for four years would soon turn to memory. Time and reality was taking over me.

Four years passed, now I am nineteen.

It’s my last year in university.

“Seven months more and college is over,” I thought. Oh, how I wished for this year to come faster. But now that it is here, I do not want it to end.

Inside my mind are a lot of fears. Once I graduate, what would happen to me? To my college friends? Will I get a job? Will I be able to feed myself and support my family?

All these thoughts haunt me every day.

“Yesterday was June, today’s August, tomorrow it’s March,” I thought to myself. Things are happening so fast, I could not even get a grip of time for myself, friends and family.

All my life I have been caught up with the work I do in school, that I hardly even noticed I have grown up. I fear that one day, I would spend my life too caught up that I would forget to make it meaningful.

Because of our busy schedules, we fail to live life, and to make sense of it.

One of my favorite authors, Os Guinness, said that life should be a pilgrimage, a personal odyssey.

However, with all the things that are happening in our lives today, are we still noticing the journey to make life meaningful? Or are we simply living just to get by?

One day, we will seep out of existence. It is undeniable that time will soon come and take us.

“Time wasted is time gone forever,” I suddenly remember what the preacher told me nine years ago.

What seemed to be something that made no sense when I was younger, became something that I now try to live by each day.

Life is our personal odyssey – a journey we are constantly on. It is only up to us how we want to spend our journey.

The question now come, how do you want to spend your life today? Rebekah (Gail Celis, Ateneo de Davao University intern)