The Secret of Life Is Enjoying the Passage of Time

“How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”

--Doctor Seuss, aka Theodore Geisel

The baby becomes the toddler. The toddler becomes the child. The child becomes the teen. The teen becomes the young adult.

One year breast fed and the next a toddling two-year-old. Last year in diapers, dipping his little toes into the waves on the beach but only if Mom holds his hand, and now, this year, running around the shore like he owns the place and can’t be stopped. Twelve months ago, an awkward and shy middle school kid, struggling to figure out how to live in his new adult body and then this August, he’s a tall and deep voiced teenager, funny, handsome, ready to take on the world, even driving the family car.

Next summer? I probably won’t see him. He’ll already be off to college.

I can’t help thinking this way each early September, in the days right after Labor Day, when the endless days of summer give way to the inexorable days of fall.  When I go through all the photos I’ve taken in my just finished travels to visit faraway friends and family and I see in those frozen snapshots of time just how quickly time passes.

Where did the summer go? Where did that little boy go?

So, I’m tempted to get a bit melancholy at the forward momentum of all of our days as mortals, as God created humans, always growing up, growing older, bound by the mysterious force of time. Maybe I want to stop time, I imagine. I want that kid to not grow up anymore or at least not grow up so fast. I want to still be able to read him a book before bedtime, Dr. Seuss, or “Good Night Moon!” But of course I can’t and if you ask him how he feels about time and growing up, he’ll tell you that time cannot go by fast enough, that he wants to be big, he so desires the days to fly by so he can become who God wants him to be, some day.

But me? I’d be happy to just pause time for a little bit. Postpone the white hairs that are taking over my beard. Push back the creaks and aches that tell me my body is not getting any younger. Waking up in the morning and feeling some twinge or dull pain and then thinking, “Well I never felt that, and there, before!” I was looking forward to my high school reunion this fall but then realized it’s been forty years since I was a teenager, a restless young man who so wanted to just get out of that small town and start my life and get time moving. 

Where did that kid go?

That’s the weird thing about time.  When we are children and youth it cannot go by fast enough.  How slow time is then, just before Christmas, just before the last day of school, just as we wait for our college application letter or to buy our first house or have our first kid or start a new a career. But at some point, time speeds up and we cannot slow it down, no matter how hard we try. How fast time is then, when we see our daughter wave from her dorm room at school and she turns away and we can’t believe that she’s so grown up. When friends start talking about retirement and we think: is it that time already? When we start reading the obituaries, and not the comics, first thing, in the newspaper.

But time: it just is. Time and its terms are never negotiable. Time is a beautiful gift from God, precious, limited, finite. We can use it wisely. We can waste it away recklessly. But always it is here and then it is gone then it is a new time and then it goes by again and then and then….

And so: will we see time as our friend or foe? As something to be denied or something to be fully embraced?  Will we run away from time or might we instead, set sail on the sea of time and let it take us away on its currents and trust that in time, that’s where we discover this one beautiful truth: time and human life is a miracle, from our Creator, and so our job is to accept it graciously and gratefully.   

As the poet and songwriter James Taylor wrote, “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. Any fool can do it. There ain't nothing to it. Nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill. But since we're on our way down, we might as well enjoy the ride.”

Let this be our September promise: to enjoy and maybe even learn to love, the passage of time.