Never enough time

My fellow reporter, Mike Armstrong wrote about times changing and it sparked something in me that I wanted to share with you.

When I retired, I heard from other retirees that they didn’t know how they got so much done before they retired because they are busier now than when they had a full-time job. I also found myself busy, doing things I enjoyed. Puttering in the yard, hanging out with grandkids and kids, and spending time with friends.

What I didn’t do was all the things I thought I would do when I retired–quilting, painting, writing, hiking, etc. As the old song says, “time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future.”

I seldom knew what time it was, or even what day it was. 

Then, one day, Dana came to visit me. She had recently taken over as editor of this paper and I had expressed an interest in working part-time as a reporter. She asked if I was serious and my new career was born. Initially, I was only going to be part-time, for the area where I live; but I was bitten by the reporter bug and off I went.

I have been enjoying my transition from a retiree back to working “full time”.  

But, back to time. 

I think the reason people feel so overwhelmed is that we have lost our ability to understand and control time. Time used to be something that we used to our advantage. Through the years we all hear expressions of wisdom and trite phrases about time. Farmers, for instance, plant a seed, add water and time does the rest (barring a plague of locusts or a major drought).

Time heals all wounds.

Time brings with it wisdom according to the old adage. We held our elders in reverence, saw them as powerful and wise because of the time they had spent living.

The sun rose, the sun set and the stars flew across the sky at night in a clockwork universe.

We felt the seasons in our bones.

We were masters of time, then someone invented the sundial and poof–things changed forever. 

Everyone  I know seems to be so busy. I hear that there are never enough hours in the day to get it all done. If someone ever feels completely serene, centered and at peace with the world; there’s a nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something. It’s not that we have too much to do, it’s that we are expected to produce at a much more accelerated pace than before all these time-saving devices came along.

Despite all the modern technology that supposedly saves us time and effort–fax machines, emails, cell phones, express mail, electronic databases, etc.; we are still rushed. 

What happens to the time saved by all these wonderful inventions? It seems to disappear.

The weekend is slowly vaporizing into an effort to maintain a certain kind of lifestyle. 

We may find ourselves thinking of the old days–of typewriters, carbon paper, inkwells and with feather pens. How far back do we have to go to find enough time? It wouldn’t matter, because it isn’t the gadgets that are the problem; it is the demand to increase output, the idealism that more is better–that we can have it all.

Industrial engineering created this phenomenon. If it’s possible to get three days of work done in a single day, will you get two days off? Not likely.

So will there ever be enough time? That’s the question that crowds my mind.

What if I was guaranteed to be healthy, fit and able to live to be 100? Would that be enough time? Would I feel like I have enough time to be and do everything I want?

Maybe, but I’ve got a feeling that I would just find more things to do, more places I want to visit, more things that I want to be.

Maybe ‘not enough time’ is just a part of life. Maybe that’s what makes life so precious and seem a little cruel at the same time.

Every day is an opportunity to do and be a little more. No matter how long we live, we will never run out of things to do, see and be because there will always be more demands and never enough time.