You know when time flies and you don’t know where it went? You want to stop it, but, of course, you can’t?
I experienced that this evening in a workshop. I am part of a leadership team doing a storytelling training on Zoom. (Yikes!) The leaders were given 90 minutes to help our small group prepare a story to be presented in the workshop. All participants would go through the process to learn the story, but one brave volunteer would actually tell the story to another group.
We had quite a schedule to follow–learn the story, find spiritual observations, plan and prepare for leading a discussion, make applications, prepare an introduction, and the list goes on a little bit more. Fifteen minutes here, five minutes there, forty minutes for this part, ten minutes there, and so forth, according to a very specific schedule.
However, I’m not sure what I did because I looked up at one point and saw this message pop up in my breakout room on Zoom–“45 minutes are finished. You will have 45 minutes more.”
What? Where did the time go? How was I so off schedule? The time had vanished! And we were getting behinder and behinder! Pretty soon, our storyteller would be beamed out of the room to tell the story that he/she was not prepared for.
Time…that strange entity that passes at the same rate each year, month, week, day, hour, and minute.
However, at times it lingers and loiters like it does for a kid waiting to go to Disneyland. Or like an American waiting for November 3. Or like the world waits for the coronavirus to stop spreading its germs. (Uncle, already!)
But most often these days, time feels like it is scooting and sprinting to the finish line of my days.
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” ~Hector Berlioz