A friend sent me a great, big hourglass for Christmas. After I opened it, we shared a hearty, knowing laugh over FaceTime. The gift represented our favorite catch-phrase, “Like sands through the hourglass… these are the days of our lives.” For years, she and I breathed those words, especially when my kids were tiny and we’d strap them back in the stroller for our sixteenth walk of the day to ’Barbucks or buckle their screaming selves into the backseat where I insisted they would, but rarely did, fall asleep. For short-but-long years, those were some precious days of our lives.
The phrase, of course, comes from the iconic soap opera, Days of Our Lives, that my sister Alissa and I used to actually binge watch! It was the original “reality” TV I guess, and we cackled at all the ridiculous, twisting plot lines – Carly buried alive! Marlena’s exorcism! Sami kidnaps handsomely-chiseled prince and performs face-transplant to conceal true identity – again! Even after we were all grown up, Alissa and I would occasionally still flip to the soap opera channel and marvel at how those characters, years and decades later, seemed frozen in time. But time, no matter how hard we try and manipulate it in pretend or real life, refuses to stand still.
Over the course of time, my relationship with it has had a tendency to go increasingly – and insanely – wrong. The hourglass has been a perfectly timed gift as a New Year rings with fresh promise: I resolve to call a cease-fire on my losing war, with time.
The dripping grains of sand have mesmerized me. They never slow down or speed up, never in a rush. Gravity steadily pulls and they peacefully push and pile on top and wait to begin again. When I flip the bottom to the top, time both starts over and carries on. A reminder that despite my efforts at telling time what to do, it has a mind of its’ own.
When I was in graduate school twenty years ago, an extremely organized student in my cohort was obsessed with planning ahead, a preparedness superhero. At the start of each semester, he would eagerly attack each class syllabus and stay up (often all night) completing everything that would need to be read or written or done over the course. His theory was that this up-front effort meant he would eliminate stress during the semester like the rest of us lazy stragglers who risked submitting assignments when they were actually due. (He was one of those people to whom arriving early is on time and to whom on time is sinfully late.) Looking back, there were two problems with his strategy. One, he hadn’t yet learned in class what he needed to in order to complete the work well. (A whole other life lesson there, isn’t it?) Two, his assumption that there is a line in the life of a student where class is still in session – or in actual life – called done. Done is nothing but a big, fat lie; done is nothing but that reality TV where the grass doesn’t grow and there is no eating in a fake kitchen and 16 people are boosting your roots and powdering your face. This is why, despite being ahead of the game, he was never actually able to kick-back and relax, while the rest of us toiled. Nope, no matter what he had already finished, he always had his cape on grinding in the midnight oil, haunted by the eternal list of – undone. (The irony is that, in 2000, we were the first class in a new program called “The Information Age MBA” – on the cusp of reaping all the benefits of the internet highway streaming immediate access to data that would make the doing of our lives so much easier, efficient and better. Ha!) Perhaps it was back then that the idea first planted that I just needed to pre-empt time in order to gain some control in life.
Somewhere along the way, I too began to think that if I could just think faster than time, I could cheat it by getting ahead of it. This underlying premise snow-balled over the years into silly habits like reading the last page of the book first to enable a quick hard skim or cleaning up from dinner before eating the actual dinner. I have often woken up each day as grateful for time as afraid of it, spending most of a precious day chasing time down, but never quite catching it. No matter how much preparation or planning, no matter the snare or what elaborate trap I set up, I couldn’t reach far enough ahead to grab or hold on, even for a second, to the slippery hands of the clock.
As the hopeful promise of the morning would fade, minutes became inhaled by the full-speed-ahead of the afternoon until once again, I’d run out of it or it would run away from me. I’d fall asleep scheming: how could I use the last elusive bits of the day to be ready for tomorrow? Tomorrow! Tomorrow would be another opportunity to manage it better. Because that must be the problem. I’m just a bad manager of time. I just need to boss it better, make better use of it and then I’ll end up with more of it. Isn’t that what we assume to be true by the products we are peddled? White boards and planning accessories and apps and alarms and color-blocked, cross-checking calendars, if used correctly, convince us they can put us back in the drivers’ seat, get ourselves some control back. Of course, to an extent, intentionality and time management have their benefits, they do smooth out the chop of what lies ahead.
I believe we were made to run best in the rhythm of time, the cycle of day and night, the activity and the rest, the discipline and repetition and habit that we choose with pieces of time that can regularly give us peace. But I’ve realized that for me, there was a point at which I started a war with time, which meant it was on one side and I was on the other. We constantly fought a battle I was never going to win – I even thought my failure was due to some defect in my personality. I’ve decided, despite what the coffee mugs and locker room decals say, that sometimes it is actually is time to give up.
Time is not a horse than can be tamed. Sometimes it is all deep breaths and open doors and riding a wave of green lights down State Street. Sometimes it is nothing but getting bumped back to start over and over again with nothing to show for it except exasperation and exhaustion. Time is beast of an animal that will ultimately roam, unfailingly unpredictably, in the wild.
And no, the solution is not that we need more of it, as my son wondered aloud when marveling at Jupiter and Saturn grazing the same-ish space for the first time in 800 years. Would life be different or better if there were more hours in the day, he asked, to get everything done? Didn’t that kind of happen this year, I thought, when COVID wiped much our calendars clean, when time suddenly and sort of stood still? And yet, for me, there still wasn’t enough of it. No, I don’t need more time; I’d probably just shove fifteen minutes worth of stuff into an extra three.
Instead, as the number of the end of another year flips, I’m going to keep working on becoming friends with the twenty-four hours I’m given. I’m going to continue to stop focusing on the perspective that time goes, and remembering the truth about time, the one God gave us – that time perfectly comes. I have as much of it as I need to do the things that will get done. And I’ll keep working on accepting that the things undone don’t matter so much because the only thing that really matters is already finished. I’ll keeping working on finding freedom in the wonder of the present, instead of being a slave to my own fears of the future, remembering that time is not a threat or a ticking bomb just waiting to explode. I’ll continue learning that the doing of things that aren’t geared toward outcome or considered productive are not a waste of time; that I can trust the wind of the spirit of God that blows unexpected creativity and spontaneity into these, the days of my life. And I’ve put my favorite Christmas present in a place I will often see it so I remember that time is just what it was meant to be – a gift.
