Wait one minute

I’ve spent quite a few days in hospital recently. 

As I mentioned last time, one of our kids had a run in with a piece of exercise equipment. That situation got a whole blog spot, but for today I want to take a minute to think about time.

Sorry that was a bit of a dad joke... Um yeah. I’m a little famous for them.

The point is, time is a funny thing. It’s a truly finite resource in the universe. It’s also a boundary that controls everything in our lives one way or another.

Take for instance the following phrases and you’ll see what I mean.

“Hang on a minute”. “In a sec”. “Just one moment”. “Well, I guess I have time now”. “Give me a call tomorrow”. “Not until your 18^th birthday”. “we used to love each other”.

Life is time.

However, there’s a whole other element to time. Einstein called it, “relativity”. You might even know the formula.

E=MC2.

Now I’m not a nuclear physicist, but from what I understand of it, he was observing and scientifically describing the way that we experience time differently depending where we are standing and what is moving around us.

What I’m genuinely curious to know whether Einstein ever experienced what I call “hospital time”. 

Time moves in truly odd ways in hospital.

When you’re recovering (or sitting with a child who is recovering) time seems to move slowly, but you look at your watch and all of a sudden many hours have passed.

On the other hand, if you’re waiting for a specific doctor or treatment in order to go home, time moves at a snail’s pace.

The other weird thing about all this is, no matter whether you perceive to be moving fast or slow you’re left exhausted by the experience. So you sit around doing nothing, but feel all tired out. 

Weird.

Time is not something we easily manage, especially in difficult times.

Up until 150 year ago or so, time was generally measured by the days and the weeks. At this point someone will want to raise sundials and Chinese water clocks. But really, most people had morning, noon and evening at best. 

The problem for our modern, western, industrialized world is that we don’t run by the week or even the day anymore. It’s now at the point where almost everything we own has a digital clock in it. We measure our time in minutes and seconds.

Advanced efficiency systems don’t leave much time for suffering and difficulty.

Suffering and difficulty just happen. You might even say they are an unavoidable part of life.

Life takes time.

One thing I realised after being a parent for while was this.

There is no “quality time” with people, there is just “time”. We pour it into people in the same way we do with love and kindness. Sure, some bits seem great or awful, but mostly it can be genuinely hard to tell.

Afterwards, life shows us which moments really counted.

Often the answer is, all of them. Moment by moment, day by day.

Quality takes time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me. I think my minute is up.