At a weekly meeting of our local public speaking club, I spoke to young students on the importance of scheduling — the science of allocating time for their studies. I cited an example of how one of my students improved her score in mathematics by managing to recall tables (from one to nine) every day. I explained to them that she did it using the “if then” technique. That is, she made a commitment: “If I am going to bed, then I will recollect tables.” And it worked for her.
But soon after my talk, I realised that it is adults who have to learn about time management from children. Maybe, the kind of time in question is a little different. When we talk of time, we talk of the physical time — the one that consists of seconds and minutes. However, there is something called mind’s time. The time our mind spends on something, with thoughts and emotions. Children are masters in the art of managing the mind’s time.
It is quite common to see people brooding for hours internally on something as mundane as spilt milk, even as they are very much in front of their computer, clocking hours as per their project management schedule. But how easily children deal with gains and losses! When a toy for a particular reason was snatched away from them, they, of course, feel terrible, but when another toy was handed over to them as replacement, they are happy again.
The point is that for children, a loss does not deserve too much of their mind’s time. There is no big win or small win, either. Whether it is a toy car or an Audi, the quantity and quality of joy of a child does not differ much. As they still operate from a pure mind, which is unburdened with knowledge, children do not stay in any state — happiness or sorrow — for too long. They are in the flow all the time.
Maybe it is on these lines that Rabindranath Tagore penned Playthings: “Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all morning/I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig ... I seek out costly playthings, and gather lumps of gold and silver/With whatever you find you create your glad games, I spend both my time and my strength over things I never can obtain.”
Coming back to my talk, I think what I told children on time management should serve some purpose. When it comes to managing physical time, they need knowledge. They need to be responsible. They probably need “if then” thinking. But when it is about mental time, they only need to unlearn anything that enters into their system from us.
Even as we teach all about time management in the physical plane, only we need to learn from them “time management” in the psychological plane. We need to learn from them not to spend too much thoughts and emotions on our gains and losses. Like them, we should learn to consider everything — a broken twig or a lump of gold or silver, as a plaything.
sankar@sankarg.com
