Why should we respect the timing?

Because if every dream came true in the blink of an eye, all dreams would lose their value.

How often do we wish something would happen right now? As young children, we look forward to become adults and to be able to do all the things that our parents don’t allow us to do – be awake late at night and watch TV, watch movies, even those that are not appropriate, buy whatever we want to and don’t have to ask for permission, no bedtime and can come back from a party late at night or early in the morning, pack up and go on the road whenever we would like to. When we do our studies, we are looking for the moment when we will finish our studies and we will have more time and we will be able to start a project, work full time and earn money so that we could do anything at any time. But what would happen if we had everything now? If we have skipped the years of growing up, if we have skipped the years of study, and so if we didn’t have the wisdom we had gained over the years?

And how do we understand when someone is saying that „everything has its time“? That person doesn’t understand that we have a limited amount of time in this world and how quickly this time is running out? Are we supposed to waste time by being patient and waiting for the right moment? But how do we perceive the concept of time?

Time is one of the basic concepts we use every day, although we cannot explain exactly what it is. If someone were to ask us what this concept – time – really means, we would have a hard time to define it; we would probably agree that we don’t really know. Of course, in everyday life we are looking at our watches, we know what time is, and so time could be something what is measured and counted. But there is also another dimension. So-called our time, the time of our life, and that is limited and that has a special value for us.

Time is the stuff life is made of, as the American proverb says. Time is not only something outside of us, what is simply measurable independently of us, but time is also something that I experience internally, within myself. As the Greek philosopher Plotinus stated: „time is the life of the soul in motion, passing from one state of life to another“.

Grammatical tenses express our understanding of time. We have a past, a present and a future. And there is a fundamental difference between past and future tense. We know exactly what has already happened, the past tense, but we can no longer change it. While the future time has not yet passed, we cannot say for sure exactly what will come, the future tense. We can only act in the present tense and so affect what will be. As Coco Chanel said: „it is foolish to be scared of what cannot be avoided; hence I am not scared of the future; it will come anyway; I am only trying to do my best so the future will be the best of all possible“. But can the time be so easily fragmented – past, present, future? St. Augustine says that time is a certain span, probably of the soul itself. And Henri Bergson makes a difference between time as a measurable quantity, given externally and independent of content, and time as a duration, the experience of flow, determined by its content. The fusion of past and future in the present. Finally, looking into ourselves, we may see past, present and future. Time is constantly spinning. We perceive the past from the present. At the same time, we can see a glimpse of the future in the present.

And we do understand that the time of this our life is limited, somehow measured, but at the same time we know that it is the very substance of life, the merge of the past, of all our experiences, and the future, the anticipation of what is to come, in the present moment. So we can distinguish between chronos time, which is a logical time, chronologically ordered, measurable and precisely defined, and kairos time, a time more difficult to measure, harder to plan and harder to define, a time that is not logical but a time that contains everything, a time of opportunity, a time when we allow ourselves to be called, because Kairos is the God of the opportunity and of the most favourable moment.

And probably we will be even more confused if we add the theory of the butterfly effect, which shows us the sensitive dependence of the development of something based on initial conditions, even subtle changes may lead to large variations. Something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings can trigger a typhoon somewhere half a world away. That means if we could magically travel through time and change even one small detail in our lives, a completely different chain of events would occur and life would bring to us a completely different future. However, we may ask – is this really something we wish for? After all, let’s not want to travel through time and let’s cherish every experience we have and let’s live in here and now with the idea that everything has its time. As Milan Kundera said: „a man has the great advantage that he cannot meet himself in a younger version“.

There is nothing better than the words of Ecclesiastes to express the idea that everything has its time: „There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: […] a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.“. I guess everything in life has its time. Maybe we don’t get what we want in a moment, maybe we get what we need first. I mean, what’s worth it never happens straight away. When we do desire something, maybe the test of whether we really mean it or not comes first. If every dream came true in the blink of an eye, all dreams would lose their value. We probably need to sacrifice something, to pay something, only in this way will we be able to recognize our efforts adequately.

We have no choice but to persist. And to persist probably means, in the end, to accept; to accept things as they are and not as we would like them to be (Rafael Nadal). And take our time, because nothing will ever change as quickly as we would like (Phil Knight). And the people who constantly make the best decisions in the situations they face are in the end the ones who achieve something, both in poker and in life. They are not necessarily the people with the best cards.

So it’s not about having the best cards in our hand, it’s about knowing how to play with what life brings us at any given moment.

V.