Opinion Articles

SOUL MATTERS: Lives change for want of taking a minute
By Jaime Abbott

A close friend and I had arranged to meet up and see a film last weekend. On Saturday morning I received a text message which read: “See you at mother at 11:30am.”

As she was a primary school friend who was once also a neighbour, I turned up at my mother's house, only to discover shortly after that she had been waiting for me at the cinema. She had meant to type “movies” but the predictive text feature on her mobile phone had instead sent the word “mother”.

This may be an extreme case, but it's certainly one example of how technology has appeared to make our lives even more busy and stressful. I remember in the 1980s we were all told technology would change the world and we would all have free time. Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way. My techno-savvy father recently exclaimed, “I am too busy to read the manual for my digital camera!”

I am the proud owner of one of the latest mobile phones. I have the luxury of being able to check my emails wherever I may be – at home, out for dinner, asleep! Not only is it a phone, it's a computer, a camera and a music player.

If we could step back in time (at least to pre-CD days when we all used cassettes) and know what the future would one day hold, this instant access to information would seem like a dream come true.

But instead, expectations of what we are capable of doing and producing in our work and personal lives have been raised. To write and send a letter could once have taken half an hour. That message can now be conveyed in seconds by email.

In fact we are constantly responding to the demands of our environment. The problem with this is that we rarely take the time to decide what it is we want in life. What is missing is time for ourselves. We spend too much time thinking about problems instead of all that is good in our lives.

Many of us don't take the time to take care of our bodies, focus on our relationships, children or our connection with God. We are so stressed that we focus on things that don't matter much. What upsets us now won't even be remembered in six months – or maybe next week!

How often do we use the excuse “I don't have time”? This could be the reason many of us don't have what we want. Yet so much can be achieved in just one minute. In one minute a human being can say “I love you” or “It's over” or “I quit”. Some of the ‘minutes' of our lives have shaped the people we are today.

In life there are a lot of minutes.

Jaimie Abbott is the Communications Manager for the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.

*This article was published in The Newcastle Herald, 9th February 2009