Time

My daughter turned six in August and every year since she turned one I say the same thing, ‘I can’t believe she’s…’ (insert number here), because six years later it’s still a shock to me that she’s a year older. It’s a shock that another year of her life, 365 days, have passed since the last time I uttered that sentence. The night before her birthday I was laying in bed, not sleeping of course, which is often the case with a mind like mine, but I laid there thinking ‘how did this happen?’. When did it change from talking about her life in days, weeks, months to years? When did it shift from saying I have a six-month-old to saying I have a six-year-old? How did all of that time pass in the blink of an eye? And I know it sounds cliché but that is how fast these years have gone by.

My daughter was born premature so the first two months of her life were definitely measured in days. Fifty to be exact because that’s how many days she was in the NICU. And I sit here six years later and I can remember exact moments, specific things that happened on certain days. I can still hear the beeping of her machines, I remember the first time I laid eyes on her, and the feeling I got when I held her to my chest for the first time. I can remember those moments perfectly because time moved slowly back then. My world was wrapped up in this little human being. My life was within the four walls of the NICU room that she was in. I didn’t let myself get distracted by any bullshit, by any outside interference. I couldn’t tell you anything that was going on in the world between August and September of 2013 because I lived every minute of that time with my husband and my daughter. And so, I can remember so much of it because those minutes seemed to last hours, those hours seemed like days and those days felt like forever.

Fast forward six years, and it actually feels like someone hit the fast forward button, and I can remember many things that happened in my daughter’s life, but not the way I remember those fifty days. I still have the calendars from the first year of her life and so I can look back and tell you the days she had certain milestones. But without them being written down I couldn’t tell you the exact day she took her first step or said her first word. I was there. I saw it happen and heard her say it but that moment isn’t etched in my mind like others because I wasn’t fully present. I’m sure I had other things going on, other distractions, a million things on my mind that had to be done and so these moments went by so fast that my brain couldn’t snap the picture. I lost focus and the reality of that is I lost time. I lost time with my daughter even though I have been with her every day of her life. I took that time I had with her for granted and I can never get those moments back.

And I think that’s a problem for many people. So many times we say ‘I wish I had more time for…’, or ‘I wish there were more hours in the day’. That’s just unrealistic so what we’re doing is making excuses for why we don’t do more with our time. There will never be 25 hours in a day. Never. That’s just reality. But does that mean that the 24 we do have is really not enough? Time is the hardest thing in the world to accept. It is the one thing we cannot stop, we cannot pause, and we cannot change. Sixty seconds is a minute, sixty minutes is an hour, twenty-four hours are a day. Those are facts. That can’t be changed no matter what we do or don’t do. Whether or not I choose to get out of bed in the morning does not stop the hands of the clock from moving. Time goes on whether I participate in it or not.

We all understand time, it’s not that hard to comprehend. Day turns into night, which turns into the next day, into the next week, month, and year. We all understand the process but that doesn’t mean we’ve learned to accept it. It boggles my mind to think that my daughter is six years old, that my Grandmother has been gone for seven months, or that my cousin Joseph was taken from us over twelve years ago. These three things completely blow my mind. How the fuck did all that happen? And where did all that time go? And what have I really done with all that time that is now lost forever? And just these thoughts alone are why I feel that time messes with my mind the most. And I’m sure it’s like that for many others. How many people would just like to press pause or rewind? Just stop time for one minute so that we can all catch our breath. It always seems out of our control because we feel like there’s nothing we can do. But that’s not true.

Today is Thursday and I’m sure most people are somewhere counting down the hours to get to the weekend. And the truth is that many people start doing that as soon as their alarm goes off on Monday morning. Monday comes and we’re already praying for the weekend to get here. Think about that. We can’t wait to get through five days of our life just to get to the two days that we think will bring us more enjoyment. Five days that we would gladly give up so we can have two days with no work, or no school or getting up early. As a society we rush through the week because we only look forward to the weekend. And to me, this is the biggest problem most people have.

We’re guilty of always looking forward to something else instead of trying to find happiness in the moment while we’re in it. Monday comes and we wish it was Friday. A new school year starts and we start counting down to Christmas break. It’s October and there’s already Christmas decorations in the store because all the Halloween decorations were up in August. In the summer we see advertisements for fall clothes and in the middle of a snowstorm in March bathing suits are back on the racks to get you ready for the next summer. We plan holidays months in advance, we book birthday parties and vacations a year in advance. We are always looking ahead for the next great thing to happen in our life instead of having a bunch of great moments right now. Time is only getting the best of us because we are letting it happen. Time is rolling on but we are definitely the ones who are stepping on the gas pedal.

You always hear people say ‘live each day like it was your last’ and I understand the saying but it’s not realistic. But that doesn’t mean that each day, or most days, we can’t create at least one moment that we’ll remember. Whether that’s being home for a family dinner, putting your phone down to play with your kids, or just silencing the world for thirty minutes and taking time for yourself. We have to stop concentrating on how great the future might be because the truth is that no one knows what the future holds no matter how hard we plan for it. So many things are out of our control. And for the most part time is one of those things. We can’t stop the minutes from passing by but we can try to slow them down by being more aware of how we’re choosing to spend those minutes. Why can’t Tuesday night be just as great as Saturday night?

Many things in life are necessary. We have to work in order to have a roof over our head, food on the table and everything else we need to survive. But at the end of our days if all people can say is that we were hard workers then we really never lived at all and we wasted whatever time we were given. Nobody wants that. We each have a choice to make time for what we really want out of life. Find the strength to choose wisely.

We always think there’s time for us to change. There’s time for us to do all the things we want to do so we put things off. And the days turn into years and we still haven’t done the things that truly make us happy. It could all end tomorrow so shut off your phone, take a day off from work, spend time with your family, read a good book, sit in the sun, take the time now instead of next year. Life is meant to be lived, not just survived. Think of all the people who have no more tomorrows to look forward to. Time will never stop for anyone. The trick is to steal as many moments as you can while you can. Moments that you will remember forever. These stolen moments are what life is all about, they are the things that give our life meaning, the things that define us.