We’ve all heard that bit of “Just one more day”. It could be just one more day to finish a project, or just one more day to complete that long pending assignment, or just one more day before you start getting into shape for that coveted dress.

When I get tired of getting this just one more day bit, I wonder what difference a day can make. But come to think of it, it really can. That, of course, is when that one day is given the importance it deserves.

Recently, I met a woman on my flight to London and we got talking about various things. She often referred to “that precious 86,400 we earn each day”. After hearing her mention it a few times, I asked her what she was referring to. The gracious Brazilian in her 50s smiled enigmatically as she said, “Oh! That, my dear girl, is the amount of seconds God gives us each day. It’s our gift, our earning. And it is completely up to us how well we live those. Do we save them, do we use them well or do we just waste them. It’s a lesson I learnt late in my life but now that I have learnt it I make each one if these seconds special and precious, giving them the importance they deserve.”

The lady, I learnt over the conversation, was headed for a trek to Macchu Picchu, after she will have visited a school friend in London. Her trip to India (which is when I met her on the flight to London) had been a deeply spiritual one. And the upcoming trek was something that she had wanted to do since she was 20 but never could, thanks to studies, then a happening career, which was succeeded by marriage and babies. “Now I want to live each dream,” she added with a smile.

It was a small conversation but one that left a deep impact on me. You get 86,400 seconds in day!? Now that is quite a number, isn’t it?

The conversation also reminded me of the lines from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, “If”: If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”

And just like that, looking at the clouds and the sunset through my plane window, I had made my New Year resolution — I know I will make every second count, each one of those precious 86,400

What’s your New Year resolution?