There I stood in the airport security line on a bustling Tuesday night, waiting to get on my flight to Los Angeles. “C’mon people, let’s move” I thought to myself while tapping my foot in annoyance. I must have made it pretty obvious, because just as I looked down to check the time (for the 50th time), I heard the elderly lady behind me speak. “Darling, why are you in such a hurry?” she asked. I went to answer her, but couldn’t find an answer. “I, uh, I guess I don’t know.” I admitted. I still don’t know why I was in such a hurry in that line. I wasn’t uncomfortable, I wasn’t late. In fact, the quicker I got through the line, the quicker I would have been sitting in silence, waiting for the plane to take off (annoyed still, probably).
Over and over again, we go through the same cycle. Sprint to the finish, wait for the next task. With my generation especially, it feels almost hardwired into our DNA to get to the end destination as quickly as possible. Waiting in lines is a bore, and waiting for the light to turn green is torture. Of course I understand to some extent. We want to get to where we are going, do the things we have to do, and get them done. But we hold such a strong adherence to time that we often get trapped in it. Standing in that line, I wasn’t present. Yes, I was physically there, but mentally I was thinking of all the things I had to do once I got through instead of taking in the very real moment. Now I’m certainly not saying that every moment in our life is pleasant, and that we should relish in awe as we sit at that red light. But constantly focusing on the future takes us out of the present.
Time is a good thing, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what you put in between it. When the first humans decided the way in which we would tell how time passes, I doubt they saw it as a burden. They weren’t all huddled around their Kate Spade planners, writing in by what time they had to go gather more nuts and berries. They simply needed a way to track how far they had come in their life’s journey. Somehow, over millions of years, this has shifted. We now run away from time, doing everything we can in the short span of time we’re given from our first breath to our last. In the process, we lose all the beauty of the journey that falls within it. The faster we go, the more we blur the details. Quality over quantity, right?
It’s surely something to think about. Time will pass at the same rate for all generations. It is not something that is conditional to our state of mind. We cannot be certain of much in this life, but we are always certain time is passing. Whether we decide to fill that time with worry and hurrying, planning and re-planning, hustling and bustling is up to us. But I think I decided, standing in that airport security line, that the journey seems a lot more fun.
