By Jean G. Fitzpatrick
Labor Day weekend: our collective crash-landing to the “real world.” The prospect is enough to make many young parents shudder. “Summer’s been so relaxed,” they tell me. “The kids swim all day or go to camp. No school projects or practices or after-school programs to drive to. We eat outside, go for walks together. We have so much more time.”
We don’t have more or less time, of course. We just use it differently. But in the rush to accomplish everything we think is important, it’s easy to forget that. I know I do. This summer a colleague and I talked about taking a poetry workshop that sounded intriguing. “I don’t have time for distractions,” I said, feeling torn. “I should be working on my book.”
“What you do in the workshop could help you with the book,” my colleague said. “It’s a chance to play with words.”
“Yes!” I wanted to tell him. “That’s just what I’m longing to do.” But the stern grown-up inside my head was warning that play like that would be a detour from what I was really supposed to be doing. “I need to focus,” I said firmly. “I’m not going to live forever.”
My colleague smiled. “Time is your friend,” he said.
For the rest of the day I repeated his words to myself. Time is your friend. What could that possibly mean, I wondered.
To this middle-aged mortal, time feels more like a prankster getting ready to yank the rug out from under my feet. No, time and I are not friends. We’re rivals in a game I can never win. These days I find myself racing against time, fighting the clock, striving to accomplish the things that matter to me. I’m not so different, you see, from the frantic young parents who cram too many activities into their family life. Nothing wrong with the things we want to do, but sometimes we get so determined that we undercut our own efforts, take the joy out.
“Time is your friend.” I pondered the phrase all the way to summer’s end on Cape Cod, a week of relaxation with my husband and grown kids. As I loosened my grip on each passing day, the words started making sense to me. Burrowing my toes in the sand at Nauset Light beach, steaming little-necks for dinner, square dancing on the Wellfleet pier, it dawned on me that my colleague and I had been talking about different kinds of time. I’d had in mind the fleeting minutes and hours of the chronological day, the appointments I schedule on my Treo. My colleague had been talking about God’s time.
We all catch glimpses of God’s time now and then, when we pause long enough to welcome it as a gift. Enjoying the natural world, playing with a young child, dancing to music, making love, praying: moments like these can transport us to a richer experience of time, to something like eternity. Short of moving to a monastery, I don’t know how to live in God’s time all day, and yet it is always present to us, always within reach. If we create space for it in the midst of all our busyness, we can stay grounded in it, its fullness enveloping us, informing every moment of our day. Paradoxical though this may sound, that usually means scheduling it. Finding a balance between chronological time and God’s time demands attention and a certain kind of discipline, and when we neglect those we end up feeling frantic.
The work and practices and projects and lessons are the stuff of life, and often joyful ones. When they turn into burdens, we’ve probably squeezed God’s time out of our busy day. Caught up in fighting the clock, we’ve forgotten that time is our friend.
Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst is a layreader in the Diocese of New York, and the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth. Visit her at www.pastoralcounseling.net.