Have you ever noticed how life seems to get faster the older we get?
I remember being a kid in the sweltering Houston summer, walking barefoot to the neighborhood pool each morning for swim team practice, then home again when it was over, anxious to get my “real day” started. I envisioned friends pouring from their houses, collecting on the sidewalks with roller skates or jump ropes or some new amazing game that we just had to play all day, until night or the mosquitoes forced us back indoors. Problem was, it never happened that way. I would come home from practice, pour a bowl of Fruit Loops, and wait for the doorbell to ring. And wait. I would look out my windows for signs of stirring across the street and go back to waiting. By the time my neighborhood friends actually came around, half the day would be gone. Don’t get me wrong – we would make the most of those afternoon and evening hours, filling every minute to the brim and stretching time as far as it would allow, and that made all the waiting worthwhile. And so by dark, when most of us had to be back home, a single day had felt like a week. And a week felt like a month.
How did we make time slow down so much? I wonder this because sometimes I’d really like to harness that ability again, to use it as an adult and slow life down. I sometimes feel like the older I get, the faster life seems to go. A day – a week – can slide by in a flash, and I stand gaping after it, wondering how it got by me. Life speeds up as an adult – work, kids, meals, errands, appointments, meetings, practices, and if we’re lucky, a little bit of sleep at night. And boom! Start over the next day with the same craziness.
This week, I discovered a little trick, and it slowed life down a bit. My kids, especially my oldest (who is in college), convinced me to drive over to the lake with them. They wanted to watch the sunset. I thought of everything I still needed to do at home: make dinner, work through the mountains of laundry, vacuum the dust off the hardwood floors, go through the mail, clean the fish tank… and on and on. Actually, I hate to admit, I thought of how nice it might be if all the kids went to the lake, leaving me at home to plow through these chores without interruption. But their pleading swayed me, and I found myself climbing into the front seat of my son’s car. He wanted to drive.
We ended up on a gravel road, parked in a remote area next to wild brush and scraggly trees and the rough, rocky shoreline. How my son knew about this place, I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask. I just went with it.
I followed my children as they picked their way across rocks, through leg-scraping brush, and across the damp sandy earth of the lake’s edge. I followed them around a quiet cove and up an embankment of rough-cropped rocks, massive sheets of stone punctuated with pebbles and broken bits of shale, until we reached the top. There before me, the lake stretched out in both directions, the panoramic view breath-stealing, and I sat myself on a recliner-sized rock while my children climbed down to the shoreline, where they explored deep indentations in the boulders that they called “caves” and skipped stones across the soft waves. Their voices, diminished by the strong winds and the ocean-like sound of lake waves pushing into rock, drifted up to me and skipped away.
I sat on my rock furniture for less than forty minutes, but it felt like hours. Time slowed. The wind blew everything from my mind and the sound of the water settled in my heart, and I felt peace creep into me and reach all the way to my fingertips. My oldest son climbed up to sit with me, and together we watched the sun set – a process that lasted mere minutes but seemed much longer. As twilight faded and darkness set in, I didn’t want to leave.
We had been gone just over an hour and yet it felt like half a day. Since then, I’ve caught myself thinking of going back, to recapture that essence of peace and to force time into a slower pace. Because I know that it’s only going to get faster the older I get.
And that’s my discovery. Time is a one-sided friend. I can’t wait for it to come and find me – I need to go find it. Wherever it lives.
I remember being a kid in the sweltering Houston summer, walking barefoot to the neighborhood pool each morning for swim team practice, then home again when it was over, anxious to get my “real day” started. I envisioned friends pouring from their houses, collecting on the sidewalks with roller skates or jump ropes or some new amazing game that we just had to play all day, until night or the mosquitoes forced us back indoors. Problem was, it never happened that way. I would come home from practice, pour a bowl of Fruit Loops, and wait for the doorbell to ring. And wait. I would look out my windows for signs of stirring across the street and go back to waiting. By the time my neighborhood friends actually came around, half the day would be gone. Don’t get me wrong – we would make the most of those afternoon and evening hours, filling every minute to the brim and stretching time as far as it would allow, and that made all the waiting worthwhile. And so by dark, when most of us had to be back home, a single day had felt like a week. And a week felt like a month.
How did we make time slow down so much? I wonder this because sometimes I’d really like to harness that ability again, to use it as an adult and slow life down. I sometimes feel like the older I get, the faster life seems to go. A day – a week – can slide by in a flash, and I stand gaping after it, wondering how it got by me. Life speeds up as an adult – work, kids, meals, errands, appointments, meetings, practices, and if we’re lucky, a little bit of sleep at night. And boom! Start over the next day with the same craziness.
This week, I discovered a little trick, and it slowed life down a bit. My kids, especially my oldest (who is in college), convinced me to drive over to the lake with them. They wanted to watch the sunset. I thought of everything I still needed to do at home: make dinner, work through the mountains of laundry, vacuum the dust off the hardwood floors, go through the mail, clean the fish tank… and on and on. Actually, I hate to admit, I thought of how nice it might be if all the kids went to the lake, leaving me at home to plow through these chores without interruption. But their pleading swayed me, and I found myself climbing into the front seat of my son’s car. He wanted to drive.
We ended up on a gravel road, parked in a remote area next to wild brush and scraggly trees and the rough, rocky shoreline. How my son knew about this place, I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask. I just went with it.
I followed my children as they picked their way across rocks, through leg-scraping brush, and across the damp sandy earth of the lake’s edge. I followed them around a quiet cove and up an embankment of rough-cropped rocks, massive sheets of stone punctuated with pebbles and broken bits of shale, until we reached the top. There before me, the lake stretched out in both directions, the panoramic view breath-stealing, and I sat myself on a recliner-sized rock while my children climbed down to the shoreline, where they explored deep indentations in the boulders that they called “caves” and skipped stones across the soft waves. Their voices, diminished by the strong winds and the ocean-like sound of lake waves pushing into rock, drifted up to me and skipped away.
I sat on my rock furniture for less than forty minutes, but it felt like hours. Time slowed. The wind blew everything from my mind and the sound of the water settled in my heart, and I felt peace creep into me and reach all the way to my fingertips. My oldest son climbed up to sit with me, and together we watched the sun set – a process that lasted mere minutes but seemed much longer. As twilight faded and darkness set in, I didn’t want to leave.
We had been gone just over an hour and yet it felt like half a day. Since then, I’ve caught myself thinking of going back, to recapture that essence of peace and to force time into a slower pace. Because I know that it’s only going to get faster the older I get.
And that’s my discovery. Time is a one-sided friend. I can’t wait for it to come and find me – I need to go find it. Wherever it lives.
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