Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Senior Citizens need to stay connected.

The need to stay connected and relevant is  common among senior citizens. While getting out of the rat race is a blessing,  what is not  a blessing is that you need to run faster in a different race just to stay relevant. We need to have a positive contribution to make, one that is meaningful and creative. Now is the time to put aside petty rivalries and  the  career-pangs of  the next promotion and the next posting. We stand on a new platform which needs a lot of re-balancing but which also can reveal to us new and refreshing perspectives on life, that we were perhaps too busy earlier to discern.We need  to slow down, to stand-and-stare, to paraphrase a famous poet. 
Now that we have all the time in the world, we need to structure our lives to create a new meaning.  And yet, it is not wholly true that we have all the time in the world--as many of our colleagues have already left us. Hence our time is not unlimited, as so much in life is not unlimited. This is another belated realization that  dawns upon many of us. Perhaps we need this new sense of time speeding up to realise it's value.We all know about Einstein's theory of relativity about how space-time is a continuum. But perhaps only in our senior years does this universal law really sink in--that time can be speeded up and slowed.
There is a wonderful poem by one of the English poets which speaks of   " behind my back always I hear, Time's winged chariot hurrying near."  But with whatever time we have, we need to use it productively, perhaps because we never fully understood in the flush of youth, that  the Sands of Time can also run out. 
mpsingh

1 comment:

  1. Dr Ashok Kapoor (ashokkpr@yahoo.com) comments " A well written article."

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