Aging Capriciously

Your “time is running out!” is a familiar line from many crime movies. Usually, the villain has just given a long winded speech on why the hero or heroine will die and promises a painful death. Of course, we all know, the heroine will not die and she will find some way to get her time back. If the villain had just shut his/her mouth and done the job, the hero would not have had the time to get out alive. The villains never seem to figure out that giving the hero this extra time will allow them to survive. We could say that the hero/heroine has managed to put time back into the bottle.

The metaphor of “time in a bottle” evokes sands running out of an hourglass or a clock slowly counting down. For each of us, our time runs down each day. Our lives speed up with each passing day and the weeks fly by like days, then the months fly by like weeks, until finally the years seem to pass like months. If only we could slow down the speed, because our time is running out!

Have you ever wondered why time keeps running faster and faster? What if we could somehow make it slow down? Time becoming slower and slower and slower instead of faster and faster and faster. Can this be possible? Is it something we can control? I think we can. If we can make it go faster and faster, why can’t we make it go slower and slower? Most of us are bent on speeding it up and we are continually finding ways to make our time go faster and faster. Multitasking, driving while talking on the cell phone, working 24/7 are all ways we use to speed time up. What if we found as many creative ways to slow time down?

I used to do some canoe racing and was always trying to paddle as fast as I could to get from one point to another. One day an old friend and avid canoeist asked me if I ever stopped to smell the flowers. In his prime, he had been a formidable canoe racer and I highly respected his ability. He told me that he had wasted too much of his youth trying to get to places in a hurry and had missed many of life’s great opportunities. He now took time to smell the flowers. I began to do the same thing. I leaned that time does indeed slow down when you are smelling flowers. Life looks different when you stop watching the clock and find ways to slow things down. You begin to live and enjoy what you do and what you have.

Do you think life is moving too fast? Are your days mere blurs of activities? Do you move constantly from one thing to another? Would you like life to move slower? Have you ever thought of all the ways you could slow time down? You are in control of the speed with which your life goes by? Maybe you should find some ways to put on the brake. Make a list and see what you can do to slow things down in your world.