Time. What to do with it?
“My God!”
“What do I do with the child flying down the yellow and red waterslide headfirst into the bright blue pool below?”
“It so beautiful, I want to stop time, and just sit and treasure the water, the child, the sunlight, the smile, the blue and the yellow and red for just a moment.”
“Can I, please?”
But instead at this very moment in time — I am not in the waterslide moment in time — but I am seated on my couch at home and I am typing, the sound of the keys slipping from the immediate present into the immediate past, and yet the present is so instantly transformed into the past that I am not at all sure that I can detect the flow.
I just finished that sentence that ended in “flow,” and the refrigerator just started humming, and the cat just left the couch beside me but as soon as I type out these events they are past.
What you are reading right now — in the present — are words I created in the past, and even as your eyes move to the next word, that word is transformed into the past for you. My past writing — as you read it in the present — immediately enters your past.
In essence: My present becomes my past becomes your present becomes your past while rushing toward the future — this is time.
Odd.
Amazing.
Slippery.
Fascinating.
Time is the progression of existence and events rushing in a seemingly irreversible direction, the past gobbling up the present and the future opening its mouth to gobble up them both.
Time is an arrow dragging us with us through the air as we fly over the landscape of existence.
Or is the arrow only in our minds? We don’t know, for sure.
What to do?
For one — although we cannot seem to hunt time down, put it in a box or bank or test tube and stop its flow in order to examine it — we can enjoy it.
How?
By leaning into every moment, by slowing time down so to speak by focusing on what is right in front of us and deep seeing it for what it is and what it does in the immediate moment in which it occurs.
Time brings reality to our doorstep, but it is our choice, and our honor, and our privilege to shake hands with it and hug it and appreciate it — or not. Time brings loss and gain, well-being and pain, beauty and ugliness near and then makes it the past. Our privilege is to peer in on it intently. Our gain is in experiencing time deeply, and in savoring it deeply, and in noticing it keenly.
Earlier this week I saw a child on a waterslide, flying down a rubber slope, splashing into a clean pool below, fingers extended to slow the ending, face lighting up with sheer water-good, safe-and-well, time-immersed joy. The child, for me, was the arrow of time slicing through good air, earth, fire and water toward the good and persistent future.
I saw it! I was there.
I saw her — the lovely child — sliding down the slide as the culmination of my recent work, my current life, my immediate purpose. I was on the team that built the wall that inclosed the courtyard, that sheltered the grass that held the waterslide that slid the child that made the gorgeous, lovely, happy moment possible!
And to the extent that I was hyper-attentive, and saw the smile framed by the flying water droplets that flew through safe-air that rose high into the divine and holy moment at the amazingly beautiful REFINERY Church — to that extent I truly experienced and understood time.
Time — that bright, sharp, fast arrow just keeps flying — and here I am, finishing my ruminations this morning, and then I am off to work, and you too, moving on now, to something else besides reading what I have written for you.
And yet, it is good, it is all good, and it is ours, our existence, our door to keep opening, our arrow, our child, our experience to love, and to savor.
Do that, savor time, luxuriate in time, splash in time, dive into time even as it dives into you, and even as it flows now into the next savory moment of your existence, for in it, in time — and in Him, in God, the creator and the master of time — you live and move and have your beautiful ever-flowing being.
For the good life, do this: Deep savor time today — and keep an eye out for joyful children on water slides.
Thrive! 