Time Is Cheap

Last Christmas, I was scrumming for a piece of fresh bed sheet after imagining and actually planning for a full afternoon nap (as the night before I was so fully awake) when I noticed a small box wrapped with decorated paper that I had immediately wondered who’s gift was not given yet the night before.

I was so sure the kids already got theirs and had in fact been wearing them since morning. Hmmmmn, this might be the one for me I had thought then and pondered whether or not it was proper for me to open it up.

I decided to unravel the gift slowly and take a peek in it even for just a teeny-weeny moment. Slowly I discovered that it was a black watch with black leather strap. I then fully extracted the gift item from the small carton and examined it more closely and I realized that it was a simple but elegant piece of men’s watch; although by its brand I knew it wasn’t costly as say a Seiko Kinetic or much more like a Tag Hauer and because the sticker prize is still embedded on it.

Compared to the timepieces I had in the past, it was relatively cheap. So I thought that maybe “time is cheap”. Cheap in a good way. Like water is cheap but we all know that without water we all are nothing. Exactly nothing. Or cheap like the air we breathe—-with no price tag on it—-but we all seek for air; we all want air and we want it all the time. This of course reminds me of a television advertisement for an American credit card company where they count the price of a number of things and say that in the end, something is priceless.

“A cheap watch….it’s priceless.”

For almost two years now, or maybe even longer, I was actually mostly without a watch on my wrist. I do my time counting with a cellphone and sometimes by just watching the position of the sky above me and the slant of my shades painted on the ground below me (This wasn’t such a dependable mode of timekeeping I had realized then).

Mostly, I went by asking some other person what he or she thinks the time it was at any particular point in time and luckily, they did answer with the right answer, with of course a margin of error of about five minutes or so. Positive or negative.

When my Seiko Kinetic went pffft some years ago, I just decided that maybe I don’t need a watch on my wrist anymore and that I’d go by without having to look at time every now and then and let time be the dictator of my daily activities. I had decided then that I was so tired of time trying to tell me when to eat or take my medicines for I had been like that all my life; rushing to catch time, stumbling to meet deadlines, gushing to catch up on work schedules. It was like Time itself had become a dreaded monster of the urban individual. When I was working in a government agency some years ago, the wall clock in front of my lowly desk was mostly the apple of my eyes, the center of my attention, hanging there like upon a master to a slave, telling me not to go home yet or to immediately be up on my toes and do this and do that. I had said to myself that I was so tired of Time that it was time to rebel and rise up against it and fling it out of my face and out of my life completely. I had even wanted to smash every alarm clock there is at home but of course, the wife would be so completely be outraged ‘bout that idea so I decided to just get rid of the watch on my wrist.

So you might ask how I got by without a wristwatch on my arms for almost three years. Well, of course it wasn’t easy at first. I had to ask a lot of people about time like I was game show host ala Bob Parker asking if the price was higher or lower. But eventually I got used to it and felt like I was a nomad living in an ancient world where nobody carries Time on their bodice and felt a little bit freer and lighter, like innocence had returned back to me, like upon a child unmindful of time, or like a bird with only the sun as its guide and never to count days and weeks and months and years.

So perhaps my wife perhaps had noticed that it was the one thing that I hadn’t on me that she had decided to give me a timepiece for Christmas. How sweet eh? With a lot of thoughts it must have been. And so now I am thinking that maybe I should be wearing watches again after a long period of time. I realized somehow that it wasn’t entirely correct to see “Time” in such a bad light for it is entirely inescapable as a reality of life, like the air we breathe.

Time gives us structure and orderliness. It arranges our life neatly and allows us to maximize our efforts and capabilities. It also helps us to manage our own resources and in totality to build and rebuild our lives. In fact, I was just sort of having fun when I had decided in the past to be without any timepiece on my body for good. It was just like having an experiment that brought some fruitful results and I can say it was worth trying and doing it and to have learned from it.

Time is cheap….no, I mean to say that “Time is priceless”.