It’s About Time
It’s About Time
I’m thinking of the line from Our Town where main character Emily says, “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” And the answer comes, “The saints and the poets maybe…they do some.” I’m here to tell you: Saints, poets, and people with the flu.
The flu took me out of commission a few weeks ago and I noticed how slowly time went by. I had no attention span, so I couldn’t concentrate on a movie, couldn’t follow a plot line, couldn’t focus to read a book. In our daily lives of multitasking, with music and the TV on and scrolling something on our phones simultaneously, it seems like the more we cram in the more time slips away just as fast.
Last week astrophysicist and writer Neil deGrasse Tyson posted on his social media that time is relative, ceases to exist when you reach the speed of light, and doesn’t exist at all inside a black hole. Yet here we are on Earth, driven by time, held hostage by it, and constantly racing against the clock. Case in point, all of us with Daylight Savings Time in the U.S. lost a precious hour yesterday.
If we’re lucky, we get to a ripe old age where we can look back and wonder how we got there, and ask ourselves, “Where did the time go?” And we can stop and pay attention. When I heard that line from Our Town as a kid, I remember feeling it was my duty as a poet (insert winky-face here to all of you who read Second-Grade Me) to pay attention to the minutia and bitty details that make up our daily lives.
Yet, sometimes, the minutia is all we can do. It can take everything we have just to get through the day. Being sick is no fun, but I did enjoy the way time seemed to stand still for me. During this, my own personal time-is-relative experiment, I listened to the rain, I tried to memorize every whisker on my dog’s face; I got a blissful few days just to slow down. And I celebrated my little victories: I stood up. Yay! I got a shower. Yay! I thought about how there’s no reason to be so hard on ourselves, to think we need to do it all, be it all, accomplish it all. I let myself just be, and it was so rejuvenating.
On any given day, we do show up, we stay all day; we’re doing laundry and dinner and making sure everyone around us feels loved, all while daring to dream dreams and to chase them down. So think highly of yourselves this week. Give yourself the love and time that you offer freely to others, and watch yourself bloom.
