There’s a clock on the wall in my bathroom that isn’t audible until 2:00 in the morning when it echoes in my ears. From my bed I can hear every second that passes in the early morning hours.
Time is such an interesting thing to me. On one hand it seems to be completely man made. Who came up with 24 hours in a day? Why is there 60 seconds in a minute? Who decided?
Then I consider the rotation of the moon, the spinning of earth, the seasons, and years; it’s impossible to think that we can control time at all. Clocks that hang on our walls or the numbers that flash on our phones aren’t controlling, they are just telling what time it is.
How often do we say, “If I only had a few more hours in my day…” Or “I need an extra day in the week.” Or “There just isn’t enough time!”
Such comments force one of two statements to be true: Either the universe is screwed up by rotating the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun, not mentioning all the other stuff that’s spinning around out there. OR we are doing things that we need not be doing. (I vote for the second one – I’ll let you tell God he’s a screw up!)
Maybe time was never meant to be controlled. Maybe it was meant to be appreciated, respected, and cherished. Maybe each second that ticks by on the clock is a second of life, and breath, and love, and not a reminder of all that has to be finished, or started, or achieved.
Maybe the tick, tick, tick at two o’clock from the bathroom wall is there to remind me that I’m just a tick in this world and I can either enjoy it or try to control it.
I wonder why I can’t hear the ticking of the clock at six am, or noon, or when I’m getting ready for bed. Perhaps because there are too many other wonderful sound like the birds, or music, or voices, or life.
At two am there’s just me… and my thoughts… and the ticking of the clock that reminds me that time cannot be controlled, nor should it be attempted. Rather it should be cherished, appreciated, and respected.
I need to fill my time wisely. I need to get rid of the things in my life that steal this precious commodity from me. I may not be able to control time, but I do have the power to decide how I will spend it. If we truly believed that each tick is life, and breath, and love, then how I choose to use it would be different. It wouldn’t be waisted like loose change tossed in a bowl. Rather it would be cherished, protected, and admired like a precious gem handed down through generations.
Tick… tick… tick… there are only so many ticks in a day. Each one is a precious as the next. Together they create a life time. There isn’t one that should be waisted. None should ever be used for anything other than life, breath, and love.