Time
Living Into The Day
By Dr. Gilbert Lawong
Taking a distance from what we have seen until now, let us look at self-management from a less active and relaxed perspective. Apart from writing down To-do lists and aligning the projects in given time, many a people prefer to live life as it comes. The only fixed thing during the day is the fact that they eat and the number of meals, the official work they have to do, if they are employed and in certain cases body hygiene and basic biological necessities. In villages back in my village, one could observe people, who after getting up and taking breakfast, went to the streets sitting at the market place and watching, what is going on. They would sit as if they count the cars moving up and down past the village. At times they meet their peers accidentally and decide to take a drink at a bar. When it is midday, some of them would go home to eat for lunch and then return to meet friends at the street side. It could occur that there is a disagreement between young people, which in turn results in a fight. These people would rush there to stop the boys from fighting. This would be the story of the following days. If nothing happens, these people would go back home in the evening, have their supper and go to bed. They had some time with their friends at the streets and count another day they lives successfully. Without planning a day because we are not aware of what could be done, we may not develop a sense of the importance of taking our fate in to our hands. Such people live day and night, from day to day and year to year to finally conclude their life without being able to tell us, of what use they where to the world and what legacy the leave behind.
With “living into the day”, our live becomes dependent of things that happen in our environment. We can decide to react to them or not. It is obviously not clear, what goals we follow, what measurable indicators we have and how we can evaluate our achievements in future.
These article seeks to discourage us from deciding a passive life of living into the day, without taking our future into our hands through actively planning, executing and evaluating our life’s projects.