"No amount of money ever bought a minute of time." 

--Tony Stark

Once upon a time, a colleague of mine told me that I would one day get to the point in life at which my time was more valuable to me than my money.  Well, I've been there for a while now....

Time.  That most valuable of commodities.  Most valuable because it is the ONE....the only one....that we can't make more of.  It seems like our entire lives center around our awareness of time, and specifically how little we actually have of it.  

Think about how many times we begin stores with "one time....".  I began typing this blog post with "once upon a time."  Ask someone how far it is to such and such a place, and they'll probably tell you how long it will take you to get there.The Bangles began Hazy Shade of Winter with the lyrics "Time, time, time."  And countless movies have been made about time, the best of them all being the Back to the Future films.  Ecclesiastes says there there is a time for every thing. I guess Solomon was as much into time as we are.  

What if we could make time stand still?  Would you?  Would you "pause" a moment so that you could look at it for as long as you wanted to?  Can you even imagine having that much power?  Where's that time stone???

I guess that's why people take photos.  I know for a fact it's why I do.  I whip out that phone, and snap that pic, and to help the preservation process, I post that Pulitzer-quality photo to Facebook! And boom!....saved forever!  Except...it's not.  Every time I look at an old photograph, I'm reminded of how much time has passed since I took it.  Pass the Wellbutrin...300mg please.  

Last night, I sat outside talking with Grant for a while about life.  He mentioned that one of his friends is leaving after graduation to learn to be a lineman for an power company.  That led to us talking about how he remembers vividly being in elementary school and how they'd get to go to the playground on Fridays in the 2nd grade.  And that led to his amazement as just how fast he got from 7 to 17.  Just wait, kid....you'll be 46 soon.  

As I sat there listening, I got the feeling that Grant might be as nostalgic as I am.  Pity....it can be debilitating.  LOL.  In all seriousness, though, looking back at the past is often fun, but it can also be very saddening, and not only because the past might be sad.  It's because we long for the past because we don't want to grow old.  We'd love nothing more than to render childhood eternal, to quote Charles Hazlewood...but we can't.  Our kids grow up.  Our parents age.  We age.  Life goes on.  

So we can't pause time.  But we can dang sure be more actively engaged in the moment in which we find ourselves...and this is what I want to do.  I think it means being more intentional with things like the dinner table.  Or the ride home.  And it means less screen time.  Starting with me.  It probably means planning ahead better so that there IS more time and so I don't feel so rushed.  And I also think it means being extremely conscious of just how fleeting time is.  Patch Adams comes to mind.  

One of the best things I'ver ever read was about tombstones.  They have a birth year and a death year and a hyphen between them.  It's what we do with the hyphen that matters.  What are you doing with your hyphen?  Hopefully not just taking pictures.....