Taking Time (reprieve)

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

A friend of mine started a blog sometime last year to work through her feelings regarding matters of the heart. She often intersperses her prose with song lyrics – maybe as inspiration, or identification or solace – I never asked and she has never said. Regardless of her reason, it has at different times aroused memories when certain songs have spoken to me in similar situations. When my more “rational” thinking returned to me, I would often scoff, “life is not a song,” not really knowing what I meant by it. It very well could have been a subconscious image of my pride or masculinity that told me I didn’t need such “art” to deliver me from inner turmoil. But there were often times where my life was not directed by art, but often art mirrored my life. With the completion tonight of a task that was a major mental burden on me, I find myself uneasily at ease.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

In reflecting upon the passing of 2009, I was compelled to look at much more of the 47 years of my life than just the past year. Yes, it was another good year, it was a productive year, but it hasn’t always been this way. And still, as productive as it was, procrastination and killing time have been my nemeses. It is why I am just now feeling the relief/uneasiness of a task completed – it should have and could have been done many days, indeed weeks, ago. Yet, for all time is, there is always and forever only one time – now. And I cannot remember a single moment of a single day during the past year that I was not at least happy, if not content with the now.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

So I am getting old. How ever many years I have been allotted, 47 of them are used. The funny thing is that for the past five years, I can say that my time has not been wasted even if I have “frittered and wasted the hours in an offhand way.” In a way, those hours have been earned even if I do happen to borrow some against future anxiety. I do not want to justify my procrastination, quite the contrary, my aim is to reduce it even more than I already have. But I also need to be sure to remind myself that what I have accomplished thus far (all 47 years and counting) is real and represents, in total, a productive use of my time. And the past few years are not the apex, but a continuing climb to an as yet unknown mountaintop.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

There is still time. My mantra is also my curse. If I could put to productive use all the time I have been given, well, who knows where I’d be. By the same token, though, I might have crashed and burned. It is important to take care of business. But it is also important to take a little time.

* Lyics from Pink Floyd's Time