Time Zooms By

These trees peaked just a few days ago and now the leaves are already fading and falling. I adore autumn but it goes by so quickly, as does spring. Heartless things! They throw themselves at us with their wild beauty, letting us imagine they are ours to keep forever, and then quietly break our hearts. Stay! I want to call out. Don’t leave us!

Thursday afternoons arrive again and again (thank you) with my last few piano students of the week. I love teaching, but I do feel a little ahh! knowing that I will be unleashed for the next few days until a new week begins. But when those last two children leave, I also note sadly that another week is gone, spent, irretrievable.

Time relentlessly zooms by, somehow leaving us behind. On to the next minute, the next hour, another autumn, a new year. Now October is nearly over.

What can we do about it? Nothing. Or maybe not nothing.

We can go slowly enough to notice the little lantern-like Wahoo berries dangling from their trees in October.

We can be unlike time, for one thing. We can go slowly. We can be careful not to zoom around doing many things without really pausing to look and breathe and be.

Knee trouble has kept me from playing pickleball lately. Though I love to play, I have to admit that I’ve loved my slow mornings with Miles—no rushing out the door, no rushing him on our walk, writing a little longer than usual, doing a morning meditation, enjoying the quiet, then walking in our neighborhood or driving to a lake to walk.

See? Fading already! But isn’t the water beautiful?

I’m reminded of that beautiful Byrds song, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (There Is a Season)” from the Bible verse. “A time to every purpose under heaven.” Yeah. Every purpose. A time to mourn. A time for peace. A time for hope and renewal. A time to go slow here in our little heaven on Earth, to open our eyes wide at the gorgeous colors and all the humble little things. A time to soak in what we have while we have it.

Because time will not be stopped! It zooms by.

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." - George Eliot

“Time is an illusion.” - Albert Einstein

“‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers. ' 'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it. '" - Lewis Carroll

“The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.” - Kahlil Gibran

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Thanks for listening,
Kay

P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the "merry thoughts."