The more I try to hold onto time, the faster it seems to slip by. Sometimes it feels more like a variable than a constant, but I know that it marches steadily forward despite what I might do to speed it up or slow it down. Sometimes it feels like life’s only constant.
There are some moments, however, when time seems to stop, and I have found that those times are either the best or the worst that this life has to offer. Sitting on a bench for fifteen minutes reading poems in the sunshine can feel like an eternity, but so can the few seconds between the words “I’ve been meaning to talk to you” and the final blow.
I feel, however, that the good moments ultimately have a longer impact. Taking a few minutes out of my day to just be is something that has been a theme for me again and again this year as the busy-ness threatens to engulf me. Watching a documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy in my Contemporary Art History Class made me realize just how “busy” I have let my life become in the last few months. The gorgeous imagery of his home in the Scottish countryside made me wish for a simpler time when people rose and rested with the sun and cared more about relationship than the rat race.
So as I sit with a warm cup of tea and a calm spirit after meeting a few deadlines, my heart is filled with a soothing that I haven’t felt for over a week, and I wonder if there will be time in heaven (a topic I was discussing with a friend last week). It will be an eternity, but never having existed outside of linear time, I find this a difficult concept to grasp. Perhaps I will never fully understand it, but for now it is nice to only worry about the unanswerable, and to allow slumber to slowly take me.
