Timely

This is the time of year when I wish I could stop time.  

I’d like to have it be around 3:30 in the afternoon on a sunny Friday in July for about a month.  It might be hard to get to sleep, but I’d take that trade for being able to go swimming or take a nap—or both!—any time I wanted for the next four weeks or so.

But how would I know how long that was?

Trust me; I’d figure it out if I had the chance.

During the school year, I often wish I could fast-forward time.  Come Monday morning, I fantasize about leaping forward to Thursday night.  I’d forsake any delicious meals or successful social encounters that might have occurred during the week if only I could get through the hard parts without having to get through them.

Or would I?

Suppose you were given the following deal: You can either live to be 80, with all of life’s challenges and failures, or die at, say, 50, but that half-century would be all the best parts, all of the wheat, none of the chaff.  Would you take it?

Of course!  You’d be a sucker not to!

Am I kidding here or kidding myself?  Maybe.  

The thing about time is that there’s no escaping it.  No matter what you do, you have to take time to do it.  No matter how hard you try, you can’t finish before you started—and, in fact, you can’t even finish when you started; some amount of time has to be used up.

I just wish you could substitute those less appealing times for the more fun ones.  If I could use the time that I spend in an all-day all-employee retreat focusing on strategic planning for the time I spend lying on the beach by the Lake, that would be perfect, since the former seems to last forever, whereas the latter goes by in an instant.

Weakness

 You don’t have to define yourself in terms of what you aren’t or can’t do.  You don’t have to embrace your shortcomings and cling to them with all your might.  You don’t have to be your failures, infirmities, or mistakes from the past.

You can quit complaining about them, too; honestly.

It seems like lots of us, (yours truly, included), lots of the time, like to wallow in the weakness; we prefer sink to the bottom rather than rise to the top; we’d rather fumble about in the darkness as opposed to lighting the proverbial candle.  

We’re babies, that’s what we are, waah-waah.

Of course, this isn’t to say that people don’t have legitimate challenges: poverty, disease, abuse, addiction, Republican parents, you name it, but still: it’s almost always possible to suck it up a bit and do something.  Just because you’re sick, for instance, doesn’t mean you’re dead.  Just because you can’t put your leg behind your head doesn’t mean you can’t touch your toes.  And even if you can’t do that, you can still probably sit up in a chair and breathe deeply—at least for a while.

Life is suffering; we all know that, but it’s not only suffering; it’s also laughter, and art, and friendship, and natural beauty, and green chile stew.  Yes, it can be hard to get out of bed in the morning, but how else are we going to be able to take naps in the afternoon if we don’t?

That old children’s song admonishes us to “stay on the sunny side of life,” and while this may not be always our preferred location—especially as global climate change threatens to make solar rays essentially toxic—there’s much to be said for adopting a positive attitude, especially as the news of the world, and our own neighborhoods, becomes increasingly negative.

May as well make the best (not worst) of what we’ve got, because it’s all that we’ve got, anyway, right?