When I was nineteen, I altered the birth date on my driver’s license (licenses weren’t laminated then), making myself two years older so I could drink at a bar with my friends, who were already legally entitled to be served. Ironically, I got away with it until I actually was twenty-one and an astute bartender spotted my forgery. “No, really-I’m twenty-one,” I wailed. “I wasn’t before, when I changed my license, but I am now. Honest!” I ended up drinking ginger ale.
In my twenties, time seemed always just out of reach, up ahead of me in some vague future-never here, right now, right in my hand. The time I wanted was next month, next year, two years away. I was surly and restless much of the time, in large part because I never looked around at the spot where I was standing at that very moment-on the earth, in my life, in my thoughts. I never said, I’m glad to be here. I was always longing to be someone else-someone older, someone with more permission slips, more passes, more access to the world.
It wasn’t all a manic rush after an elusive future-I discovered gardening in my twenties. Anyone who has ever gardened knows that plants have their own timetable; you can’t speed them up. They will bloom, blossom, grow according to rhythms and cycles that are beyond our reach. I lived in a canyon home with my boyfriend and our garden was on the slope of a hill. The moments when I slowed down, really drank in the beauty and mystery around me are the moments that stand out like brilliant jewels in my memory. Although I think I appreciate them more now, in memory, than I did then.
In my thirties, something started to gnaw at me-a feeling that I was always just off the mark, looking behind or ahead, but never absorbing the present moment. Unfortunately, I didn’t allow myself to stay with that feeling. Instead, I distracted myself with dramas, most of them self-inflicted. As if life isn’t dramatic enough.
Only when I entered my forties did I start to regard time with more reverence, more respect. I began to cherish the moment at hand-just that-whatever it contained. A hummingbird probing a flower blossom for nectar, a father carrying his little girl on his shoulders, the glimpse of a stranger’s smile as we pass each other on the street. Moments are huge if you let them be. But you have to crawl inside them and stretch yourself out, inhabit them.
All of us are thinking about time these days-maybe more than we ever did. Because on a crisp blue morning in Manhattan, a day that signaled autumn, that made New Yorkers look forward to orange leaves and clean winds, the world changed in an instant. There isn’t anyone who won’t remember where they were when they found out that incomprehensible acts of terrorism had come to our soil. There probably isn’t anyone who hasn’t held tight to every moment since then, because so many are gone, so many are grieving, and because you just never know.
I’ve noticed that people are walking a little slower, making eye contact with strangers more willingly. We are so much sadder and wiser than we were on Monday, and time seems so much more precious.
I’m hardly one to give advice, but I think this is a good suggestion: Treat time the way Suze Orman suggests we treat money-with respect, with an attitude that there is no such thing as an insignificant amount. A dollar isn’t just a dollar; it has the potential for growing into much more. A moment isn’t just a moment; lives can change in sixty seconds.
When I heard Suze Orman calculate how much money one could save just by eliminating that daily latte, I thought, what if we did that with time? Is a three dollar latte worth sacrificing tens of thousands of dollars down the line if you just saved and invested that money? Of course not. (Or if it is, you have a serious caffeine addiction and you need help.) Is agonizing and fretting over the mistakes you made in the past, or the things you think you desperately need in the future more rewarding than looking out the window at new buds on a tree? If you answer yes to that, you haven’t looked at a tree recently. Turn off the computer, ignore the phone, walk outside. We are richer for the moments that we embrace and cherish, even if embracing those moments means our work has to be put on hold. It doesn’t take long to watch the sun sink, or to call a loved one or a friend and ask how they are doing; it takes barely a moment to fold your arms around your child. Time doesn’t wait for us; it’s up to us to hold tightly to it.
