Time Lines

Sometimes life pushes us in directions we ought to have found for ourselves ~
Bob Hoskins, "Maid in Manhattan"

Even when you know it's the right thing to do, putting the crazy behind you is not always an easy thing to do. It will trail after you like a lost puppy, whining and pleading for you to take it back, promising whatever it takes to tempt you into a backward step.  Changing habits takes practice, determination, focus and an open mind. Learning to see the same old things in new and different ways - trusting in yourself to pull it off without the luxury of instant gratification - goes against the grain.  Time is a short, muddy, dead end road.  You learn to stay between the ditches or risk a wreck.  You learn to wait.  You don't learn to wait patiently.

At times, as I find myself rushing through life - more or less from one crisis to the next - I can't help but wonder at the silliness of it all.   A few seconds here and there can't possibly make a difference, I remind myself as I wait for the endless light to change, the pizza to arrive, the 'phone to ring, the file to upload, the dogs to come in, the clothes to dry, the band to start.  And yet I resent this empty, idle time.  It creates space I feel compelled to fill, usually with worry or impatience or simmering anger.  

I'm coming! I would yell to my mother.

So is Christmas! she would yell back, a tired old line but delivered with a certain menace that always made me cringe.  The more I tried to be quick, the more frantic and scattered I became, exhausting her patience and short circuiting my confidence.

If you were Paul Revere..... she would say with a long suffering sigh.

I know, I know, we'd still be British colonies, I would answer, a line I knew by heart and would grow up to use myself on more than one occasion.

I didn't think much about time then.  When you're twelve or thirteen (and going on twenty-one as my mother was fond of saying), it stretches out before you like an interstate highway.  My head was full of book reports and worry about running out of my allowance, whether or not I'd be asked to the junior prom and had I practiced enough for my next piano lesson. Time was a misty abstraction, a grown up worry I didn't have time for and couldn't make sense of.

At sixty-six, it's closing in, pressing in on me from all sides.  It's gotten too real.

Meanwhile life keeps pushing me, sometimes gently, sometimes with enough force to move a mountain.  I tell myself that it knows what it's doing but the truth is that I've come to believe that if a thing is meant to be, then it will find a way.  

Be nice to time.  It doesn't have much of a sense of humor and it doesn't need you the way you need it.

Let life give you the occasional shove.