As we mature, everything in the world seems to slow down—except for time. Time accelerates.
When I was young, I felt like I had all the time in the world; summers stretched on like infinite oceans. Now, every project, every simple chore, inevitably runs up against the hard wall of “not enough time.”
With maturity comes a hyper-awareness of the clock. We begin to think about the end of our time, wondering when it will come and whether we will have enough money, friends, and care until we no longer need them. I suspect this particular anxiety is a modern phenomenon. Historically, the elderly lived with family, their twilight years woven into the responsibility of the younger generation. But, well… times change. (See? There I go again.)
I often wonder if God, in his infinite existence, ever considers or worries about time. I suspect not. Perhaps we should take a cue from the divine and set aside our temporal anxieties. It reminds me of two characters who mastered this art: a farmer I once heard of who took his hog for a leisurely walk every single day, and a man I actually ran across who spent hours just happily chipping away at rocks. Neither had any concern whatsoever for the clock.
Maybe the secret isn’t to try and slow the clock down, but to change what we are measuring. The farmer walking his hog and the man chipping at rocks weren’t wasting time; they were occupying it. When we stop viewing time as a finite currency we are rapidly spending, and instead see it as a canvas we are currently occupying, the rush subsides. Eternity isn’t a vast stretch of days waiting for us after we die; it is the depth of the single quiet moment we choose to inhabit right now.
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