It was my Nanay who first taught me the value of time.
I was six years old, standing barefoot on the cool cement floor of our house, my hair still wet from a hurried bath. Outside, the morning sun was already climbing, but the clock on the wall read only a little past seven. The school bell wouldn’t ring until noon.
That morning felt different.
The old rhythm of my days — breakfast, then play — was gone. In its place came a strange new routine: bathing right after breakfast, wearing a uniform, getting ready hours before school even began.
Then there was me. Thin-bodied, restless, my soul quietly pocketing moments without knowing why. Excited, yes — but confused most of the time. The new itinerary of a student’s life was a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.
That was when I first heard the phrase that would echo through my life:
“Benjamin” (pronounced Ben-ha-min, the Filipino way), “bilis ang nguya, di ka hihintayin ng oras.”
Chew faster — time will not wait for you.
Nanay said it often, not just about eating. It could mean bathe faster, tie your shoelaces faster, wear your uniform faster, even wake up faster.
She herself moved with a quiet urgency. Graceful yet efficient, she never wasted a second. She spoke clearly, bluntly — her words like stepping stones over a wide puddle, carefully placed so you could cross without slipping. Each one carried weight, bridging her heart to my stubborn young mind.
One day she told me:
“Learn to value time. This is the only intangible commodity in life that has currency.”
Money, she said, was for the world. Time was for life.
Time is gold — that’s what people say. But Nanay didn’t pretend hers was gold. She said hers was copper, my Tatay’s was twenty-four karat, and mine, at that moment, was only paper. But if I learned to value time, she promised, time itself would value me back — becoming as precious as oil or even diamond.
I was six then.
I am fifty-two now.
And now, I understand.
Time is both friend and foe. It moves painfully slow when you are ahead, and viciously fast when you are behind. It crawls when you watch it, and vanishes through the speed of light when you look away.
Not all of us have time of gold. At six, mine was paper. By ten, I had entered the woodworking trade, and that paper had become a gin bottle.
A few years later, I was the youngest piece rater in a furniture shop. That gin bottle skipped iron and mild steel, landing straight into copper faster than I could catch my breath.
Through blood, sweat, and tears, copper turned to silver. But life is unpredictable. There came a time when it was worth less than cardboard, less than a PET bottle. As a single father of two, with no steady income to wake up to, my time was no better than a scrap metal — the rusty kind you couldn't even sell in a junk shop.
And that was when Nanay’s words came rushing back.
Time will not wait for you. You must move with it — and fast.
In the years that followed, I learned to treat time like the rarest of currencies. I guarded it, invested it, and refused to spend it on what did not matter. I saw that most of us are junk shop time — spent without thought. Some are pawnshop time — holding value for emergencies. A rare few are stock market time — growing exponentially because they know exactly where to place it.
But the truth is, whatever currency our time holds, it is finite. We cannot earn more of it. We can trade time for money, but we cannot trade money for more time.
Death is inevitable. We can create fortune from time, but not a single fortune can buy back even a fraction of a heartbeat.
I think back to that morning when I was six, my Nanay urging me to chew faster. I understand now: it was never about the breakfast. It was about life.
Because time will not wait for you. And if you’re wise, you won’t wait for it either.
Originally published on Benjie's Bench - Measuring Life's lessons in Millimeters