Money & Time Are Different Currencies. Time Is More Precious!

The Currency of a Life

At this stage of my life, I sometimes find myself looking backwards, not with regret, but with a strange sense of wonder. Sixty years have passed almost imperceptibly. I can still remember the boy I was, the uncomplicated happiness of childhood, the restless dreams of college, the urgency of beginning a career, the responsibilities of work, the arrival of marriage and family, and the years that followed, filled with duties, journeys, friendships, triumphs and disappointments.

When I look back now, I realise something I could never have understood when I was young: we spend our entire lives exchanging time for things, without always asking whether the things are worth the time.

That is why Haruki Murakami's words have stayed with me:

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”

As a child, I possessed very little money, yet somehow had an abundance of what I now recognise as priceless wealth: time. An afternoon seemed endless. A conversation with a friend could last for hours. A family meal needed no occasion. Happiness was often found in the smallest things, precisely because nobody had yet taught us to measure life by its price.

I still carry one particular childhood memory with me. It was our 3500 Km car drive from Kannur to Jorhat in our brand new Velvet Blue Premier President car with the registration number MRH 8998, after my aunt Pechalema's wedding. My father drove most times, with my mother and little sister with him in the front seat, and my brother, and me with a driver in the rear seat. That was quite an adventure in the early 1970s with no satellite navigation and only primitive roadmaps and roadside enquiries to find our way. I still remember the sights, the sounds, the food we ate, the bridges we crossed the way people's dresses, language, graffiti on walls, posters, and mannerisms changed as we navigated from the south to the east of India crossing 10 odd states. It was an extraordinary feeling to be on the road day and night for a week. At the time, I thought it was simply another journey. Today, I understand that it was a treasure. It kindled the spirit of adventure in me. I would gladly part with any fortune to experience that week once again with my father and mother back with me, but then no amount of money can take me back there ever again. It was a different time and a different place that can be visited only in memory.

Then came adulthood.

College gave me dreams. Work gave me ambition and responsibility. Marriage taught me that another person's happiness could become as important as my own. Children taught me perhaps the greatest lesson of all: that time does not wait for anyone. One day they are small enough to hold in your arms; then suddenly they are adults, walking confidently into lives of their own.

Somewhere between these milestones, I began measuring life in years rather than days.

Looking back, the things I once considered important have grown small in memory. Possessions have lost their shine. Professional accomplishments have receded. Money has been earned, spent and earned again.

But moments remain: a parent's voice, a friend's laughter, a family gathered around a table, a child's embrace, a family wedding, visiting our grandparents, a journey shared with people I love, a conversation that lasted past midnight, or a quiet evening beside my wife when nothing happened, yet everything mattered. These are the treasures no balance sheet can hold.

Money can buy comfort, convenience, travel, good food and beautiful things. It can make life easier. But it cannot buy presence. It cannot return a childhood afternoon, restore a missed conversation or give us another  hour with someone who has gone. Nor can it recover the years we spent postponing happiness until some imagined future arrived. That is the cruel arithmetic of growing older: we become richer in experience just as we become poorer in time.

So I want to spend the years that remain less in mere busyness and more in presence: calling the people I love without waiting for a reason, lingering at the table, travelling while my feet still want to wander, watching sunsets without reaching for my phone, listening to familiar stories and making new memories while I still can. I want to give people something more valuable than things: my undivided time.

Perhaps that is the purest form of love. When we give someone our time, we give them a portion of our life that we can never reclaim.

At sixty-plus, I no longer think the purpose of life is to accumulate endlessly. It is to recognise what is worth accumulating: more conversations, laughter, journeys, shared meals, forgiveness, curiosity and presence.

Money is something I possess. Time is something I spend. And the older I become, the more clearly I understand that only one of those currencies is finite. A successful life may therefore be measured not by the wealth we leave behind, but by the irreplaceable hours we gave to people and moments that made being alive worthwhile.

In the end, our houses, possessions, photographs and bank accounts will pass beyond our keeping. But in another person's heart, something of us may remain: a remembered voice, a familiar laugh, a hand held across a table.

That is where our lives continue - not in what we owned, but in the time we gave away. Spend your money wisely. But spend your time as though it is your life. 

Because it is.