Make the most out of life

Thursday Herald.

Macheso was speaking on the passing on of his fellow musician Tongai “Dhewa” Moyo’s death.
He said, “You see no one has control over God and I think the one thing I have learnt about death is that we have to make the most of our lives.”
Words well thought out and spoken I must say. Is it not that we learn everyday from our daily experiences. These words spoke to my heart as the message for the season.

I have been working on bringing sanity to my life because it seems like there is so much to be done yet there is very little time. Also I have been failing to do certain things that are equally important.
I know I am not the only one reeling under pressure of workloads from all fronts. I have heard people complain about lack of time to accomplish what has to be accomplished.
It appears that everything wants a piece of us and we are failing to cope. These days we have to literally jump from one event to the other.

We have to juggle time between events and at times end up exhausted, stressed or just “showing face” at some functions.
I have been interrogating this belief that there is very little time to do what has to be done. Some of the things that I have been asking myself are: What is really important to me in life?
How do I measure important things in life? Is it about how much money they bring to the table or the value they add to life and lives of others?

Dear reader, your answer to these questions is largely determined by your priorities. Bob Buford in his book “From Success to Significance” writes about how one from mid-life (35 years) moves focus from pursuing success to other things of value that bring fulfilment.
Dear reader, you maybe asking how one gets the most out of life or what it means to get the most out of life? I think this means different things to different people depending on one’s outlook on life and priorities. Is getting the most out of life doing anything and everything so you can say at the end of the day I have been everywhere, I have seen everything and above all I have done everything.

Are we talking about quantity or quality? So often I have heard people say “nguva haizi yedu” (time is not ours). Yes certainly as has been said time waits for no one. We cannot make time standstill neither can we replay it. It is only something that God alone can do.
Mere mortals like me and you can only replay an event and not the time. We cannot turn back the hands of time. It is foolhardy to live in the past and wish for what could have been. Doing this is throwing your life away.

You lose time and opportunities. I would like to encourage someone caught in the past to rise, shake off all the dust and clean out the cobwebs that are trapping you.
I think I have also come across an adage that says time is like a river and you cannot touch the same current twice. Each second counts for days, months, decades and centuries. Unfortunately, we live as if we have all the time in the world. We keep postponing decisions and actions to the next day, when next day comes it becomes next time.

By so doing we miss a lot of opportunities to save a soul, to do good and to better our lives and those of our families and beyond. In school we used to be told that a stitch in time saves nine.
This means that timeliness in attending to a situation reduces the effects of the problem. There is the Pareto Principle that 80/20 that can make all the difference to our lives.
Each one should make optimal use of time through doing the 20 percent of the things that bring 80 percent result. Unfortunately most people are busy bodies and therefore do 80 percent of things that bring a mere 20 percent result.

Personally I am in the process of working on those things that bring the greater value based on my priorities. There are certain things that we do that do not endure forever and they have no silo where you can stockpile them for future use.
The Shona elders in their wisdom said “matakadya kare haanyaradzi mwana”, meaning perishable things in the past do not bring reprieve in the present. You need to get a fresh supply all the time.

To me such things are of lesser value. Yet we invest a lot of time in doing these things and spend fortunes on them. What is sad, they never come to you or support when you are in a situation.
Yet had you invested in relationships these people would be there to prop you up. When I consider eternity I always feel that the most important things are those that we put right at the periphery. Think of how a visit to a sick person would do to the spirits of the sick person and the affected. Imagine how satisfying it will be to put a smile on the face of an orphaned child through spending time playing with him or her or a donation.

Consider how lending an ear and a chat to that elderly person that you consider boring would do to them. In my view, these are some of the very valuable things that help us to get the most out of life.
Your life is not about you and you alone. It is about serving others. As it is recorded in the Bible, some will earn their ticket to eternity through visiting the sick and the prisoners and giving food to the hungry.

We really need to invest in the things that give the most out of life. I believe “most” is about quality and service.