Two Years of Time

clock

A few years ago my mom counseled a single mother named Pam about going back to school.

Pam was in her late twenties and had a daughter in elementary school. She worked full-time in retail and desperately wanted to get her family out of the cycle of living paycheck-to-paycheck. She dreamed of a 9-5 office job with health insurance and free weekends.

But there were a lot of reasons going back to college didn’t seem feasible:

She had always been a poor student.
She didn’t have enough money to pay for school and miss work.
She already struggled to spend time with her daughter, adding night classes and homework to her full schedule seemed impossible.
The journey from remedial math to graduation was daunting, especially when taking one or two classes at a time.

The logistics were certainly both real and challenging, but as the conversation ended my mom cut to one essential truth:

Two years are going to pass and you are either going to have your degree or not, but two years are going to pass just the same.

When we are young, it’s so hard to understand how quickly time can pass. Waiting for Christmas or summer vacation to arrive is interminably hard. When we’re teenagers, we can’t help but imagine real success must happen quickly or not at all. There is no way a freshman can conceive of how quickly graduation will arrive and how their entire time at school will seem like a blur.

In fact, when life begins we measure it in days, then weeks, and finally months. That period of time seems so endless that it’s surprising when the normal pace of life snaps back like a rubberband, and we notice that we have begun to measure our children’s lives in years. Their infancy, which felt like forever, was just a blink of an eye.

We all experience the pace of time differently. Our perceptions and experiences of it are varied, but time itself is unchanging. The tick tock of the clock is steady. It is our impressions which make us feel like we are either rushing ahead or falling behind. Time marches solidly.

I recently read a passage by Deepak Chopra describing the constancy of time and how our choices can shape it.

He described two mothers locked in the dinner rush. One was impatient with her kids, yelling and getting frustrated as she oversaw their homework while making dinner and dealing with discipline. The other remained calm as she moved from task to task without fretting. By bedtime, everyone in both houses was clean, fed and asleep, but the woman who experienced a crushing sensation of time had a less happy family. A less happy life.

Time is constant. We are the variable.

Food for Thought:

Two years will pass by all of us lucky enough to live for another 730 days. What will you have done or not done?

Pam, well, she got her degree, a cubicle, and free weekends.

It took her three years,

but time passed quickly.