running out of time

Today, I planned to write about time.

And maybe because time has been on my mind the last several days, the “lateness” of this post is not lost on me.

I’m at a place in my life, in my grief, where time has restarted. I’m not sure where the last 4 3/4 years have gone. I know I lived every excruciating second of the first years. I know I’ve been here. But it’s as though time itself has restarted.

When someone asks my age, I hesitate. I count back. For me, I am still not-yet-39. For me, everything of the last 5+ years is still to come, or hasn’t been. Not the grief parts. I mean the outside-world parts: it doesn’t make sense that I am not turning 39, that soon I will be 45. It doesn’t make sense that there is 5 years of music, movies, books, children born, families made, paintings painted. There is so much I’ve missed.

Like Rip Van Winkle, I’m waking up to a different world, one that has gone on without me.

As time resumes, there are things – interests – waking up in me that have not been heard from in many years. It has been a long, long road of sadness and death. Now that there is interest returning, I want to do all things, and I want to do them now.

Which means I am incredibly irritated at wasted time. Or delays. Or the natural order of things that says that nothing can be rushed – it all has to happen in its own time. It makes me want to yell at everyone and everything: I do not have time for the natural order of things. None of us “have time”!

Has this happened for you? An irritation with the way things are timed? A sense of urgency, and maybe frustration, because you know we are always running out of time?

When out-of-order death or crazy injury show up in your life, it brings that visceral reality right to the forefront of everything. As one friend said soon after Matt died – that line between life and death is always right beside each one of us, isn’t it. You never know when you’ll cross it.

It doesn’t feel morbid to me to think about how short this life can be. It makes me a little bit greedy. Given what I have lived, given what you have lived, it makes sense to want, to demand, all the good things this life can give – adventure, friendship, art, music – whenever they can be found. I don’t want to wait around for goodness to be in my life.

It has been almost six long years. I want it now.

None of us have much time.

How about you? How has the nature of time changed for you? Are you in the place of every day being a marathon, or does every day speed past? If there is the tiniest glimmer of interest-in-life inside you, do you feel (as I do) somewhat aggressive about claiming it? Let us know in the comments.