Time is a clever thief

Time is a clever thief, he thinks, as it marches out the door

For now that I know full well its worth, I don’t seem to have any more.

I think about time a lot, what a funny thing it is. How, when we were kids, it was actually possible to get bored. We’d whine at our parents, “I got nothing to dooooooo…..” Finally they’d threaten to give us some chores if we didn’t find something ourselves.  

But time changes everything doesn’t it? Changes our attitudes toward things, changes our relationship to it. Time (like other things) seems to shrink with age and we have less and less of it as the years go by. So we try to cram as much as we can into each moment, knowing how precious each one is. But then we wonder, is that the best use of it? To make sure that we have none left over at the end - as if that’s even possible? Or should we let our moments drag while we sit around contemplating things like, well . . . time?

My son and I talk about weird time stuff . . . concepts like beyond eternity and the implications of that. Or what the boundaries of the past’s future would be relative to today. We like movies that play around with concepts of time. Like Deja Vu with Denzel Washington or Frequency with Dennis Quaid or The Lake House with Sandra Bullock. Movies we can argue the plausibility of – as if any of it actually IS plausible.

And yet . . . I was in Singapore in the spring of ’98 for a few weeks of business. It was hectic and there was a lot to do. Plus the whole jet lag thing and, well . . . I woke up one morning and remembered that my anniversary had been the day before. And I’d forgotten all about it. So there I was sitting in my hotel room, feeling like a real bonehead when I realized that time had provided a reprieve. See, Singapore is a day ahead of Houston. So I called a Houston florist, one who did same-day deliveries and I ordered a gorgeous orchid delivered to my husband at work. Then I went to work myself – the day after my husband would get the gift I just ordered. He called me later that day (which was really the day before) and told me how thrilled he was with the orchid! So the gift was perfect and … did I have to tell him how late I'd been orchestrating the whole thing? I think not.

So, wouldn’t it be fun if we could actually do more stuff like that?

 

It was the day after tomorrow and Ronda remembered that she’d forgotten her brother’s birthday. So she set the clock back several days and went shopping, picking out a sweater she’d seen him wearing the following week. Then she snuck back into his birthday with the gift wrapped in next Sunday’s paper. She set the gift on the new coffee table, the one he’d buy with the money he’d get for his birthday. She snuck out the back door, barely closing it before he got home from work the next day. It seemed she’d been gone only a few moments but in reality, she hadn’t been gone at all. He looked up and smiled, already wearing the sweater. It fit perfectly. Of course it had to - after all, he’d been wearing it for a while now.

   

But no . . . we can’t do anything like that, can we? We’re stuck within this linear flow of time, living from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, trying to cram all we can into each one. 

It was just yesterday when I was floating around in the pool thinking about time . . . specifically, how little of it I have left to enjoy my backyard oasis. Only one more summer before my husband’s retirement will take us up into the Blue Ridge Mountains. I suddenly realized how close that really is! How the next two years will barrel down on me like a derailed freight train. So, I paddled around a little longer, trying to appreciate these last "few moments" before they're gone! 

And I guess maybe that's it, isn't it - how we choose to spend what little time we have. Perhaps we should be going for quality rather than quantity, be more selective about the activities we participate in - the thoughts we choose to think, the people we opt to spend time with. Maybe we even need to try to be bored from time to time. Just so we can feel that sense of standing still. Rather than trying to outrun the freight train.