Time Out

The Rolling Stones got it wrong in 1964…Time is not on their side, it is not on anyone’s side…especially mine.  Time is a precious commodity, yet we find ourselves wishing it away by the hour and the day with the likes of “Can’t wait until 5:00pm” or “Is it Friday yet?” While whiling away the hours at work is not the most enjoyable expenditure of our time, it is usually a necessary one.  But my focus here is more on the bigger picture.

Last time I checked…”Time” still works the same as when I was younger…60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day…and so on.  But somehow these measurables are moving much faster than then did in my youth.  Summers would last a lifetime, school years an eternity.  Now those two and ten month time spans go by in the blink of an eye.  Similar to other items of value…the less of it we have, the faster it seems to go.  I heard somewhere that time keeps flowing like a river to the sea...til its gone forever.  My river of time seems to have Class 6 rapids.  I think I got a handle on why it dissipates quicker for me than for others.

Time is always something I took for granted. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, and driven home by Aerosmith, “Life is a journey, not a destination”. Yet we mark our time with these destinations.  And I am the guiltiest of us all.  I would have in mind a certain timeline, feeling once I arrive there, THEN I could move on.  But you wind up chasing that destination like a hat down a windy street. You focus on the hat, and you pass by everything else…and you never know what you might have missed.

Attempting to obtain these destinations there were the inevitable setbacks. Sometimes I would have to go back to square one and reset the timetable, but resetting the clock was not possible…that time was gone forever. These destinations could be career, relationships…just about anything.  Sometimes these destinations where never achieved. When evaluating why they were not, my excuse would be, “I thought I’d have more time.”  That has become my epithet to a point Christina knows I want that chiseled on my tombstone.  Unfortunately the time I did have to spend could never be retrieved. Did I even enjoy the passage of this time, or was my shortsighted focus blinding me along the way.  I now try to stop and smell the roses, but it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks…well, unless your name is Max.  I still have those destinations earmarked down the line but when I get there will be too late? The time will be gone, but maybe this time it will be well spent. 

I believe Roger Hodgson of SuperTramp summed it up best for me. “When you look through the years and see what you could have been, what might have been…

If you'd had more time.