David Hodge

It doesn’t amaze me anymore that I can wake up and find whole stretches of time gone, almost as if they never happened. One gets caught up with a book and an afternoon, sometimes a day disappears. Playing in a show can erase an entire week. Working on a project can find you on an entirely different page of the calendar.

And it’s not that it all vanishes. The “every day” of every day life, at least for most of us, still continues. Somehow the shopping, cleaning, cooking, and the simple mechanisms of keeping in touch with friends and family manage to happen, for the most part anyway.

Because it’s easy for people my age (fifty-two if you must know) to dwell on the rapidly depleting resource of time, focusing on the final point somewhere down the road, it becomes more important to look deeper at all the aspects of the time that’s passing. Instead of thinking “I have five, ten, fourty-two years left,” I can think that if the next five years are as full as the five just past, I’m not going to have the time to think about how much time is left.

At the same time, finding moments to simply sit and think, or not think about anything, seem to be presents that pop up at odd points in the day to unwrap and treasure. Open them up when you find them and don’t feel guilty about doing so!

Peace