Time.
And stress about time.
Pretty common these days.
Some say there’s not enough time in the day to get it all done.“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” (~William Penn)
Some say they’ve got too much time on their hands and don’t know what to do with it.
Some say time goes by too fast and others that it goes by too slow.
Seems like the one thing that we humans living in this 21st century can’t quite make our peace with – is time.
Well, time and peace. But that’s another story.
It’s the great leveler, you know. Time.
Rich, poor, uneducated, or toting a couple or more advanced degrees – it doesn’t matter what you are or where you fall on these or any other continuum – you’ll never get more or less than anyone else in a day.
Twenty-four hours in a day, seven of those in a week, fifty-two of them in a year. And that’s it.
So far no one’s found a way to stretch it or shrink it or travel back or forward in it. Though that might be fun. Then again, anyone who’s seen Back to the Future knows that might just throw your future into a tailspin.
So why, I wonder, is it that we cannot seem to make peace with time?
A lot of people say that we’re just trying to do too much these days. That the way to make peace with time and bring peace into our life is to simplify, simplify, simplify.
Just stop doing so much, they say.
Stop the relentless running after the wind, they say, and concentrate those precious and limited hours on doing only those things that we’re really passionate about. It’s a compelling argument.
But somehow, it doesn’t quite work.
Because the truth is, unless you’re someone who genuinely enjoys doing the routine and the mundane and – yes, the cleaning of the toilets or the running of the errands – you’re going to have to spend some of your precious time on these not-so-much-your-passion tasks.
Then there are the so-very-organized people who say that what you really need to do is to make every moment count – count the moments and plan and plan and plan and even fill up those hours in which you used to do useless things like watch tv, or scroll through your Facebook feed, or…sleep. Fill them with those things that don’t fit into the other sixteen hours of your day, and then you’ll be all set. The argument being, of course, that you really can do it all.
But of course you really can’t do it all and we all know that. So that never really works out either.
Then there are those who say they have too much time. Who don’t know how to fill it after a lifetime of filling it. The ones whose kids are grown and flown and are too busy with their own busyness and business to spend time with the ones whose nest they flew out of. So memories seem sometimes to be the only things that time can be filled with.
But this doesn’t really work either.
“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” (~Theophrastus)
The truth about time is, it’s the great leveler.
It’s the one thing that not one of us can control. No matter how old or how young or how smart or how rich we are. We cannot ever, ever, ever control time.
We can, however, control how we spend it.
And spend it we do. On so many things.
We spend it on worrying or on sitting in traffic.
We spend it on wondering if that thing we’re worrying about is going to happen and what in the world we’ll do if it does.
We spend it on anger and resentment and jealousy and lots of other things that frankly, in the cold light of day, don’t really even deserve the time of day.
We spend it on stress and on so many other things that don’t deserve the time of day either.
Sort of seems at times like we throw it away.
The one thing we don’t seem to do about time, is cherish it.
But if we did?
Well, maybe we might spend it a little differently.
~xo,
LuAnne
