Today was looong. I actually keep double checking the date to see if it’s still Monday. And yes, in fact, it is. By the time I hit post on this, it will probably be nearly Tuesday.
My kids weren’t supposed to be home from school and daycare until Thursday. But, daycare closed unexpectedly. And the school-age kiddo has Influenza. So my three days of “finish work before vacation” and also “prep for Christmas” in the evenings have just evaporated. It’s Monday (I think), and I’m completely worn out. All the buffer I planned into the week—poof.
Time is funny that way. It can move fast. Or slow. And yet we measure it precisely and track our days by clocks carefully calibrated to sync across time and space.
For the last few days I’ve been contemplating the nature of time, thanks to a series on NPR called Finding Time: Take a Journey Through the Fourth Dimension to Learn What Makes Us Tick.
I don’t understand theoretical physics and I’m not going to attempt to. But I do like the poetry of it. Time is not immutable. We can measure it all we want, with atomic clocks or the phases of the moon or the lines etched across our faces, and yet it bends.
A day can be gratingly slow, like when your kids are sick or you’re slogging through spreadsheets or other unpleasant tasks. But a day can also be pleasurably slow. Like when you’re on vacation and you’ve turned off your phone and left your laptop at home. When the morning stretches before you with nothing to do but read or watch the water lap against a dock.
We can’t be on vacation every day, unfortunately. Life is full of obligations and frenetic moments that leave us harried and tired. But maybe when those days feel long, we can stretch a few moments of the good kind of slow too.
That’s what I’m doing right now while I drink a glass of wine, write this piece, and rewatch The Jane Austen Book Club. Slow, pleasant movies like that are really soothing. The house is otherwise quiet. My husband is downstairs working on a Christmas present for the kids. I do have more things I could be doing, but for now this is what I need to recalibrate my own internal clock before turning in for the night. Before doing it all again tomorrow.
I wonder, will Tuesday feel slow or will it race by? Only time will tell . . .
Photo credit: Kevin Ku on Unsplash
So true. Time and how we experience it is one of the great mysteries of life. I find it fascinating how varied our experience of time can be. And yet all we ever really have to experience is the present moment.