How did your year go? Mine went in a flash.

HAPPY New Year! How did your year go? Mine went in a flash.

I suppose working in a newspaper has something to do with it.

When you are chasing deadlines daily, working on days when ordinary people don't work, and always consciously a day ahead and preparing the following day's edition today, you lose track of time easily.

Some people say if you enjoy what you are doing, then you lose track of time easily.

If that is true, then journalists must have the most enjoyable job in the world - otherwise how else can you explain that we are always wishing for more hours in our days so that we won't bust the deadline?

"How will this year turn out?" a news vendor asked me last Friday.

Will the general election be held? Will property prices take a dive?

Is there going to be a global recession?

Should one buy gold or silver or keep one's money in the bank instead?

I should know, he said, since I worked in the newspaper business.

I said I don't.

If I could foretell the future, I would be better off setting up a table in Chinatown and tell fortunes.

It's less stressful and possibly more lucrative, considering the number of gullible people around these days.

I am guessing that you have school-going children or if your first child is starting school on Wednesday, this year will pass by even faster than you can imagine.

Between sending your children to school and rushing them home in time for tuition each day, you will wish you have more than hours to your day.

Before you know it, it will be the end of the year and you will be worrying whether you have saved enough to get them new stationery or uniforms, now that books are free.

And if your children are already in secondary school, or ready for college in a few years, you will not have time to admire the dials on your watch because you will be wondering where to make the extra ringgit today so that you will have enough to put them through higher education, especially if you know that they will not be getting help elsewhere.

Someone told me long ago that the speed with which life passes you by is relative to the depth of your pockets. I agree.

If you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from or how to put dinner on your table this evening, time will pass at a slower pace because you will have more time to think about other things than making ends meet.

Of course, the wealthy will not agree and claim that they too have their woes.

At least, we - the have-lesses and have-nots - can sleep more soundly at night with less to worry about if the banks run away with our money or the global economic downturn will turn our cash into ash.

Life's fair, I think, if we consider that we are all equally given 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and not a second less.

How our lives turn out tomorrow will be determined by how we choose to use our entitlement.

We can gripe at the grimness we see around us and be immobilised by all the uncertainties they bring. Or we can go out there and treat the falling sky like a cosy blanket.

Even if time stood still for us, some of us we will still find it insufficient and still find things to complain about.