For Wilshire Baptist Church
I was visiting in a hospital room, and when I looked up at the clock on the wall I saw something unusual: the second hand jumped forward five seconds at a time while the minute and hour hands moved at their normal, almost imperceptible pace. There it was: a perfect example of how time can fly and crawl, rush and drag, all at the same time.
Time always drags in hospital rooms because there is so much waiting: for doctors with diagnoses, nurses with medicines and comforts, food service, and especially for discharge orders and release. The time moves at the same speed it moves on the streets outside and everywhere else on the planet, but it feels like it has slowed to a crawl.
At other times the effect is opposite. When we’re doing something we love to do, time seems to race by and we feel cheated. But again, the real time we are living is no different from what anyone else is living, including families huddled in hospital rooms.
Wouldn’t it be nice if our perception was reversed: the good times moving at a blissfully slow pace and the bad times moving mercifully fast? We seem to be wired the opposite way, but it’s not just perception. We rush through life, and that creates its own discomforts — whether brain freeze from eating ice cream too fast or deep regret from not being fully engaged with family and friends.
My brother and I once drove all day and saved our appetites for a favorite restaurant on the plaza in Taos, N.M. When the food arrived at the table, we scarfed it down and then my brother looked at his empty plate and said with true disappointment, “I ate that so fast I’m not sure I even tasted it.” We do that with other slices of our lives. We devour them so quickly that we don’t fully appreciate their goodness.
This is the time of year for posting pictures of first days of school and going off to college. The photos are often accompanied by some expression of, “Where did the time go?” The answer is it went where time always goes—through the hour glass in a constant, steady flow. The bigger question is, “Where were we when it was going?” Were we fully focused and engaged or were we busy doing something less important.
John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I’m thinking it might be good to look up from those plans and experience this life and time we have right now.