WE ONLY HAVE 60 SECONDS

It was a weird kind of a Saturday… I witnessed the paradox of life… In one evening, I saw two diametrically opposite sides of life... First, I attended a prayer ceremony for someone who could have achieved so much but didn’t get the chance to… And later that same Saturday, I attended a party to celebrate success and the successful… A celebration of the A game, and people who had achieved the kind of success most people only dreamt of in their lifetimes. 

He was only 26… He wanted to be the best actor in the world… He wanted to make movies that the world would remember long after he was gone… He wanted to marry the woman he dreamt of… And there was no doubt in his mind that he’d find her someday. He wanted to do so much… And he was going to do it all… SOMEDAY.

But death took away Akshat without any warning… And along with Akshat went all his dreams and hopes for that elusive someday.

The 40-odd people that had gathered that afternoon to say their final goodbyes, could not help but remember the smiling face that greeted you whenever you saw him… He was gone, but not without knowing that he had touched at least these 40 lives that had come to mourn.

That same evening I sat amongst Milkha Singh, Kapil Dev, Dhanraj Pillai and many other sportsmen who had given us Indians many proud moments. These were people who had chased their dream even in their most impossible moments and made them come true… People who had not just touched success, but embraced it… These were people who had done what Akshat wanted to do—they’d made history…

Two events... The same day… But just one lesson… That we only have the next 60 seconds... So let’s make it count.

I’ve entered my 40th year… You’d think it would shake me up. Take a closer look at my life and make life-altering and uncharacteristic decisions. In a way, that has happened… It’s only not quite that dramatic. I’ve realised that the one change I want to make is to find time for my cricket. I don’t want to miss practice week after week till it simply becomes something I was good at once upon a time.

For the 3 hours that I practice, I’m doing something for me. It’s the feeling closest to unadulterated happiness, and I need that in my life. It’s a different kind of fulfillment, one that’s got nothing to do with work, profits, losses and deadlines.

I know I should have played more when I was younger… I shouldn’t have wasted my 20s and a large part of my 30s doing things that I didn’t enjoy. But I did. And the things that I really wanted to do were always put on the backburner. Tucked behind the excuse of there’s always tomorrow, the next week, the next year…

But now the years have rolled into one another, and I still have a long, long list of things that I meant to do… Someday. But Akshat’s loss made me realise that there might not be a someday for me. It might not be something as final as death. But maybe something will happen the next week that will take away my ability to spin the ball, to chase it across the field.

Aren’t most of us guilty of the same crime? Aren’t we cheating ourselves of happiness, of precious moments of joy because we’re waiting for another day to let them envelop us? It might be a small, inconsequential thing for the others, but for you it might be the line that separates the dark cloud from the silver lining. Why are we so callous with our happiness? Why do we keep putting it off? And what makes us so damn sure that happiness is going to keep waiting for us to give it a chance? Why don’t we realise that each second that passes us by is a second lost from the gift of life…

That the only thing that we can be certain of is that one day it will all be over… Time is a gift that comes with a sell-by date… Much like the pack of chocolate that has to be thrown away… And all that will be left is a big pile of regret, because we kept waiting for tomorrow to devour the chocolate bit by bit. And when that tomorrow came, we realised that the chocolate had gone bad. Is that what we really want from life?

Youth has a tendency to make one feel infallible… To make one believe that everything is possible… It gives one the arrogance to believe that ‘I am invincible’…  That feeling that nothing can touch you… Not even death… It’s only middle age that makes you realise that what you felt when you were young was an illusion and the reality is that we are here on borrowed time… And we have only that much of it remaining to make the most of… That the clock is ticking and we’ve still got so many people to meet and so many lives to touch… To give something of yourself to the people that came in your life… To make sure that the gift of life we’ve received is not spent in believing the illusion that tomorrow is ours…

I’ve realised that I want to spend each day not just searching for any great meaning to my life but in cherishing and making the most of every second that I have here… In just doing things that really matter to me in my heart… things that bring a smile to my face… Do anything… Make anything… The choice is mine… But do something...

Whenever I feel like I have too much time to make true the unfulfilled dreams… I play a game with myself… I look at my watch and concentrate on the seconds hand ticking away… I blank out all thoughts from my mind and just keep looking at it… As it completes one cycle and then another, I think to myself and realise, that no matter what I achieve, how much money I stash away in the bank, what position I reach in my company, there’s no way I can bring back the one minute that just went by. That minute of my life is over… lost and irretrievable.

That Saturday just reinforced my belief… WE ONLY HAVE THE NEXT 60 SECONDS, make them matter… To you, if not to anyone else.