Hajja Salesjana November December 2017

6 I wish to offer you some reflections about time and its possibilities. Let’s imagine that there exists a bankwhich adds to our personal account 86,400 dollars every morning. This strange bank does not carry over our funds from one day to the next, but every night it takes out of our personal account whatever we have not used. Everyone of us has an account in one of these banks! What is the name on this bank? Time! Each day this bank, beyond adding new funds, removes whatever is left over from the day before. It never keeps a balance. If the full amount is not used up in one day, what remains is lost. It cannot be reversed. You cannot make any credit card charges to your account for the income of the following day. You must live in the present with the funds for today. So: • To understand well the value of an entire year, we can ask a student who has had to repeat a course; It is most natural to think that we will always see a new dawn, that we will have good health, and that life will hold many possibilities – but it is not always this way and neither is it so for everyone. It is certain that time or, better, life – which has time as its measure – envelops a host of possibilities, relationships, and experiences… Not long ago, I was speaking with a Brother in his 80s. He was advising me to live my life with passion – squeezing out of it all I could, just as one would squeeze a lemon or a bunch of grapes to get out all the juice. This is what this Brother, who has excellent intellectual, academic, and religious formation, told me. He did not mean to say that one must live a crazy life, running from one place to the other, or seeking this or that because one is dissatisfied. No. He was referring, rather, to the impassioned exercise of taking control of one’s life, of this true gift received from the Lord of Life. THE MESSAGE OF THE RECTOR MAJOR DON ÁNGEL FERNÁNDEZ ARTIME LET US CELEBRATE LIFE! Each new day is a blank page presenting us with a host of possibilities on the horizons of our life. This is the incredible gift that we call time .