It’s been over a year and a half since I posted.
When I looked back at my last post, I was surprised that it
had been that long since I last wrote.
The past 20 months feel like they have flown by. It doesn’t feel like nearly two years. We all understand this relative nature of
time, because regardless of what our clocks say, regardless of how we talk
about time, for each of us, it flows at different speeds and those speeds are
determined by our perception.
We usually associate time moving quickly with fun, but the
past year and a half didn’t pass in a time-flies-when-you’re-having-fun
way. In part, it went quickly because
I’m getting older, and I no longer catalog life by how many Gilligan’s Islands
I can watch in a given amount of time.
When I was eight, 30 minutes (about the time of one episode
of Gilligan’s Island) was a long time. I
would watch the clock in school with 20 minutes till recess and tell myself
that it wasn’t very long. I’d say, “If
you started Gilligan’s Island right now, you’d be running out on the field
about the time the professor makes a nuclear powered blender out of a banana
and some palm fronds. It’s not that
long. Really.” But it was. It was an eternity. And even though the long awaited recess was equally
20 minutes long, those 20 minutes were criminally short. The bell seemed to ring ending recess before
they even finished the song. “…the
professor aaand Mary Aaa… Brrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnngggggg!” Try telling an eight
year old that time is constant. He knows
it isn’t true.I’m not eight anymore. Life no longer passes in stranded-boater-chunks. It now passes weeks and months at a time. It passes with seasons and estimated tax payments and Super Bowls and Presidential cycles. Even TV doesn’t pass in nice 30 minute segments anymore. With Netflix, I now measure television in entire seasons or series, but that doesn’t mean that my sense of time is now more accurate.
I had my teeth cleaned this morning. It went really well. No issues.
In and out in 25 minutes, but that doesn’t really tell the story does
it? In the context of my inner eight year old, it felt like the equivalent the
entire Gilligan’s Island series, all 98 episodes, twice.
The cycle is the same every time: I recline in the chair and tell myself to
relax. I willfully release the tension
from my feet; then my legs; my hands; my shoulders; my head and neck… Oh
crap! Sorry. I open
my mouth back up. I try not to gag on
the saliva pooling in the back of my throat.
I ignore the hygienist scraping the plaque off my teeth with that tiny
tool made of discarded chalkboards. I
hope that on the next pass, her little pick will slide cleanly between my teeth
rather than catching again and threatening to pry two of my incisors off the
bone. (I actually don’t think my gums are receding. I think my teeth are just yanked slightly
farther out of my gums during each cleaning.) About this time I realize there
isn’t any blood in my hands. Somehow,
even though I’m not gripping anything, I have rigidly contracted all the
muscles below my elbows to the extent that I can feel the blood flowing back
into my palms as I force them to loosen.
So, I tell myself to relax. I willfully
release the tension from my feet; then my legs…
I also think time passed quickly between posts because the recently,
my life has been characterized by a lot of growth and thinking. Whether with my wife, or my small group, or
my counselor, I’ve been working through a lot of “stuff”. Some of it spiritual. Some of it relational. All of it personal. And even though I may still have the sense of
humor of an eight year old boy (because every man does), I know my wife would agree
that I’ve grown up a decent amount in the past year or two.
So, with all that elapsed, when I tried to encapsulate it
into a post, I drew a blank. It wasn’t
that I couldn’t think of anything. It
was more like when you get too close to a video projected on a big screen and
all you see are the pixels. I think
there is something there if I can step far enough back, but right now, I’m
still seeing the pixels.
It’s been several weeks since I started thinking about this
post (approximately equivalent to 2 Gilligan’s Islands), and I’m still
struggling. So, because I couldn’t compose
something out of all the bits of information, I decided to write several posts
about the pixels and hope they coalesce into a coherent image. Since I already started, pixel #1 is time.
