I remember as a child counting down the days before Christmas. They went agonizingly slowly. My mother would say, “Wait till you get old. Time will just fly by,” but I didn’t believe it. I guess I’ve gotten to that “Old.” Time just flies by these days. It seems as though we just finished summer camp; how can it possibly be January?
Time seems very strange these days. As my mother would say, it flies by. As I look back over the last year, it seems as though last New Year’s was a lifetime away. How can it be so short moving forward and so long looking back? I’ve heard that time is just a concept we have created, not grounded in any reality except what we have given it. If that’s true, I wish I could find the secret for finding more of it, slowing it down, stretching it out, or whatever. But there you go, when I think all of those things, I am giving it power and grounding it in my reality.
I always feel as though I’m two weeks behind. If I could stop the world for a couple weeks, I could catch up, and then it would be a steady ride. But it doesn’t happen. I can’t stop the world, and life just keeps coming at me. Even it I could stop the world, I know that within a matter of weeks, maybe even days, I would be falling hopelessly behind again.
The other day, I was talking with Dr. Michael Gigante. He is a therapist who has been working with the staff for the last 12 years. He said I lived with contentment. I count my blessings. I am happy with who I am, with my relations with others, with where I live, the work I do, the money I earn. He said that many people live with discontent. They aren’t happy with what they have. They want more, and when they have more, they want more still. But we hadn’t been talking about time. So how do I bring my contentment to my time issues?
There is a saying that I think came from the Course in Miracles. It says, “Do without doing and everything gets done.” There are times when I feel in that zone: the person I need to talk with calls me, and I don’t have to play telephone tag for three days; the file I’m looking for is right under that piece of paper sitting on my desk, and I don’t have to spend 10 minutes looking through everything over and over and worrying that I threw it out by mistake; a former work-study intern is looking for work over semester break, just when Paige is planning to go on vacation for two weeks and we are already down one office person. In my ideal world, things like these fall into place like everyday miracles. Work is done effortlessly. There is no sense of being late, being rushed, not having enough time to do everything that needs doing, and yet everything gets done and gets done well.
So what keeps me from being in that space all the time? It is a place of timelessness. As the song goes, “Don’t worry. Be Happy.” No need to worry about deadlines, unfinished tasks, the endless to-do list. How can I find contentment that whatever gets done is what is supposed to be done, that it doesn’t matter if the end of the year fundraising campaign doesn’t go to the printer by the beginning of November, and that Rowe folks will still feel appreciated even if they don’t receive a thank you within a week of their gift?
I blame computers for all of this. They are supposed to save time, and in some ways indeed they do, only to gobble it up in other ways. Much collaborative work can get done using the Internet. Maybe I long for the days when I wasn’t asked my opinion. People don’t think twice about sending out an e-mail, though they would be less inclined to take the time to write a letter. Is communication better thanks to e-mail, or is it more cumbersome?
Today, I got a forwarded e-mail about a straw-bale house that is being featured in Natural Home Magazine. It was designed by the architect who is designing our new guest house, which will be built with green technology. It’s the house he brought me to see after I told him about my dreams for this new guest house. Because I have been telling friends of Rowe about this new idea, I thought it would be good to get several copies of the magazine. I got on the web, located where to subscribe, got a web site to find the phone number to contact the magazine directly because the company taking subscriptions could only take year-long subscriptions. I then went to the web site and found out they recently changed their service, and I would need to register and get a password and ID for a service I would probably never use again. I don’t want a password or ID. I just want a few magazines. Then I looked up to see it was 3:10 and I was supposed to be up at the Farmhouse at 3 pm to say good-bye to the camp folks who had been here for reunion. Where did that time go?
A friend of mine was laughing at me and with me the other day. I told her that if I call someone and get an answering machine, and if it says to call that person’s cell phone, I never do. I feel as though, if it isn’t an emergency, then calling the cell phone is an invasion on that person’s time and space. That was when my friend laughed and said I was really out of it. I’m glad there isn’t cell service in Rowe. She told me her husband was just given a BlackBerry and BlueTooth for work. I didn’t even know what a BlueTooth was. Is it something you get from eating too many BlackBerries?
I think that somehow, when we all got plugged in, a shift happened. It has to do with time. I want to declare a day of unplugging – no computers, telephones, answering machines, palm pilots, Black Berries, BlueTooths, or anything else. Maybe then I’ll catch up and get back on track.
When I was home for the holidays, my 5-year-old granddaughter asked me whether I could stay a few more days so I could attend her school’s holiday concert. I told her I couldn’t because I had to get back for work. She put her hand on her hip, looked me in the eye, and said emphatically, “But Grammy, what’s more important, work or your grandkids?” Oh, honey, if it could only be that easy.
Felicity
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