Time

I feel like I've run out of time. I'm heading into surgery on Tuesday (maybe... I think so... in all likelihood) and I feel like it's a momentous event, the excision of Polly the Polyp. 

I also feels like it is an end.

It doesn't help when the nurse on the phone reminds you to bring your ID and health insurance card along with a copy of your advanced directives. And not to bother bringing anything else of value with you. Like St. Peter doesn't have use for your moderately old, helplessly out of date iPhone or your favorite lip gloss.

There's so much I'd like to do in this life, so many more things to write. I've been writing with reckless abandon for the last three weeks as though the sands are all in the bottom half of the hour glass and there are just a few grains clinging to the glass above with a tiny bit of static and a prayer.

But I have more to say, please hear that. I hope I haven't used up all of my good lines. I hope I sleep soundly for three minutes and then pop back into the soundness of mind that I've appreciated to date.

We speak of time as though it is a thing we have, or have had. As though the reality is that we contained the time and kept it captive and not that it had run through us graying our hair and weathering our skin. But that is the reality. Time cannot be contained any more than spirit or gravity. You don't get to cash in your good karma or your 401(k) for an extra few minutes, no matter how many great last lines you've still got up your sleeve.

Time is long at the dentist and short in Hawaii, and no matter how long or short it is, you will never have it, and it will never be enough.

So look at your agenda today, tomorrow, next week and realize - recognize - that this electronic screen or paper schedule is an illusion of time in a cage, of control of what will come. Fill your days with experiences that make time feel short, that steal your breath, not long, grueling tasks that make you hold it. I'm serious. I've been self-employed for three and a half years now, and while I sometimes get to the bottom of my bank account, living this way has not done me wrong.

Time is short today, and for that, I am grateful.

When time is short, I'm running with the tide, not against it. And wherever it goes, wherever it takes me, I am grateful that I'm not in line at the dentist or the DMV, that I'm not tediously recounting all of the miles I've driven in a year.

I would rather live my life in the sunset - the brief moments that pass too quickly that can never be captured. I would rather be inspired by time than held captive by it.