Time Passages

Photo: Freshly-decanted red wine vinegar is in clear glass bottles that show its vibrant ruby tones. To the right is the jar with the "mother" that catalyses ordinary wine into a delightfully tangy-sour condiment. The missing ingredient is time.

This week felt like the longest week of my life. By Tuesday afternoon, I found myself thinking: Well, at least it's Friday... Wait, what? It isn't Friday??

What should have been a run-of-the mill schedule turned turgid and turbulent. Small issues became cataclysmic and overblown. The news was decisively bad and the bad shifted to worse. Nothing got done when it was supposed to and like a slow-moving derailment, stress levels increased and burdened an already busy week.

But there's nothing like the promise of Friday to inspire me to get caught up and finish tasks so I can get on to the weekend.

The song Time Passages by Al Stewart was the theme the year I graduated high school, full of hopes and dreams and the kind of blind optimism that only the young can have. In those days, it felt like an ocean of time between summer and Christmas - two seasons that were sure to bring good things. Now, the months between fly so swiftly that I'm longing for things that have just passed me by.

It is easy to so look forward that you're skipping the here-and-now. I try very hard not to do that. A family summer trip last year that I'd anticipated for almost a year was so delicious and exciting that I didn't even want to acknowledge it was approaching because I simply didn't want it to end. Does this actually slow down time? I don't think so, but by refraining from looking too closely at the goal, I began to feel that I was heel-dragging the calendar. 

Some might call it "living in the moment" but appreciating the present isn't as easy as just slowing your breath or staking a point in time. It requires careful attention to milestones but carefree embracing of even the trickling wait times. I take photos in my mind that I can recall later - those suspended seconds where I'm sitting at the table before a meal is served, those minutes where my beloved grandkids cuddle in while watching a movie, the times when I'm surrounded by laughter and voices lilting with contentment. Those are the snapshots that I will have to look back on later, when the actual thing is in the rearview. 

Why does time seem to move slowly when you're a kid and to race relentlessly when you're grown? Is it the running out of the clock or the awareness that there's always so much going on?  So, this Friday afternoon, in the stillness of a warm crackling fire, I will raise a glass of golden honeyed mead to the bygone days and the ones just ahead. I will work at appreciating the easily-overlooked moments and relishing even the in-between.

I've got exactly 422 minutes of this delicious Friday left. Here's a cheers to the years!