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“This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.”

-One of Gollum's riddles for Bilbo in “The Hobbit” (the answer: time)

It is June.  Already.  Summer is just around the corner.  I know this to be true because the calendar tells me so (even though it isn’t particularly warm right now in Oregon), and because school is out (or nearly out) in some parts of the country as my friends with children can confirm.  I can’t believe how quickly time passes as I get older.  When I was young, summers seemed to last a lifetime.  You could squeeze in 100 adventures into a day with time to spare.   Now, my summers seem a lot less eventful and seemingly conspire with one another to be only a few blinks apart from every other season (the perils of working year-round, I fear).  Nowadays I am a far cry short of my youthful tally of 100 adventures in a day:  I feel as though I have thwarted time if I can squeeze in laundry, exercise, and an errand or two before I have to be at work.  Not exactly exciting stuff when compared to exploring undiscovered kingdoms, climbing trees, making mud pies, and catching fireflies.  People say that this is par for the course for growing older: time accelerates.   It already been two years since I graduated from pharmacy school (and one year since my residency), and it hardly feels as though much time has passed at all. And yet so much has happened!  In the last three months, my husband and I bought and sold a house, started new jobs, and moved twice.   Lots of changes, and yet, where did all the time go?

How does one “keep” time in this day and age when people are pulled in so many different directions by their personal and professional pursuits? Some people keep time by checking their phones (or watches, for us older types).  Some people like to set their clocks ahead a few minutes to “cheat” time, and in so doing, convince themselves that they are keeping time at bay. Scheduling and time management techniques certainly help us squeeze the most productivity out of our day, but even with all the organizational skills in the world, you cannot “make” time.  Or make up for “lost” time.  I find it difficult just to be “on time” most days, which drives my husband crazy because he likes to arrive at places ahead of time.  Arriving “on time” to him means 
L-A-T-E.  A friend in pharmacy school tried to “keep” time by hitting the snooze button on her phone while she got ready in the morning.  She swore that hitting it twenty times in the morning when we roomed together for Midyear helped her stay “on time.”  “On time” for my friend meant 10-15 minutes “past time” for everyone else.  It also meant “no sleep” for me.  Clearly, time is relative.  But still fleeting.

How did time become such a precious, fleeting commodity?   Most people will insist it is a function of growing older. There certainly is a direct correlation between aging and physically having less time left to us, but this does not explain the seemingly apparent velocity of lost time as one ages.  We aren’t aging any faster now than we did when we were ten (even though it may feel that way at times).  But I think the answer lies in how we choose to spend our time:  My theory is that we spend too much of our lives marking time.   As a performer, I mark time to save my energy for the big performance.  Sometimes I mark time to count the bars of music before my entrance, so I am not late or early.  Clearly, marking time is necessary, up to a point.  However, if all we do is mark , we never get to experience the sheer joy of being completely out there.  Of going full tilt at something with wild abandon.  Of being 100% committed to whatever it is we are doing.  We ALL mark time, whether or not we are onstage or not:  In school we portion our time carefully to get through a difficult test or challenging week.  Ultimately, we mark time until graduation, the time, we convince ourselves, that “life will finally start.”  But life never seems to get to the point where it starts because after graduation, we create other milestones to mark the time in increments, and by so doing, continue to postpone living in the moment.  At work, we often mark time to “just get to the weekend” or to “just get to our stretch of days off.” But if we regard our time (whether at work or at school) as “something to be gotten through” to get to something else (whatever it may be) we end up marking time almost all the time to get to tinier and tinier moments in between.  And, in this way, we set ourselves up for a life half-lived.  We never actually let ourselves live out loud.   There can be no performance in this world that is worth the sacrifice of marking an entire life in the wings.

The act of marking time is why I think we don’t notice time passing in the present.  Because we are living for some moment in the future: an entrance or an exit that hasn’t yet happened.  And living too much in the future never really lets us live fully in the now around us (living in the now is something that children do very well, hence the 100 adventures a day!).  We can’t completely relinquish all the daily responsibilities we have as adults (both at work and at home), but we can try to keep time in the present by living in the moment as much as possible.  If we marked time a little less and cared more about making the most of the time we did have, I think we would find time to be less fleeting.  I think we might skip the laundry one day and enjoy a stroll in our neighborhood, time in the garden, or a conversation with a good friend. But we don’t have time, we think, for those things.  We think we have no time to spare, and so, very often, this belief becomes the reality we live in. 

There is nothing wrong with dreaming about that long weekend or sunny vacation in the tropics, but don’t let the dream of what might be supersede your enjoyment of what is here and now and the reality of the life that is yours here in the present. The reality of the here and now is that you have this moment to make your life whatever you want it to be.  Make it beautiful.   However you choose to keep time, try and  live your life out loud as boldly and blithely as possible.  The big performances certainly are amazing (graduation, marriage, your first job, having a baby, etc.), but it is the time in between those milestones that gives those big moments shape, direction, and purpose.  Enjoy the every day moments where you can and when you can.  Take a moment today to enjoy the view from where you are right at this present time unencumbered by any thoughts of where you want to be or what the future holds.  Keep time by embracing the present.