I was going to follow up on my last post by writing about storms today. (I'll come back to that one later.) Instead, because it is fresh in my brain, I'm going to give you a preview of the huge topic that has consumed most of my thinking for the past year or more: time.
Time is a really weird thing. And I will confess up front that time, as measured by clocks and calendars, doesn't hold a lot of importance to me. Being on time to events isn't a high priority. In fact, I don't like being on time and hate being early. But it isn't just that. I also don't really care how long a meeting lasts. I don't care which day we celebrate a birthday. My wife asks me when I will be done at work? I don't know. Probably right after I finish.
Rather than in minutes and hours and days, to me, time is expressed as too early, or too long, or too soon, or just right.
If the meeting lasted too long it isn't that it took too many minutes. It is that we didn't use the time well. Some 30 minute meetings feel like a life-sapping trial. Other, much longer meetings leave me energized and wishing we could continue. It isn't about the minutes.
This attitude is something I have really had to work on as an adult. Because, while time doesn't mean much to me (it seems pretty arbitrary), it means a lot to others. And I can't say I care about people if I dismiss what is important to them.
And there's the rub. I may not care about the quantity of time, (the minutes) but I absolutely care about the quality of it (the moments). A minute is just a measurement. A moment is an event. I love moments. They matter.
Anyway. I'm skipping the "storms" topic today, because last week, I watched a movie titled "About Time". It's a British, romantic comedy with the key word here being "British". We Americans like our comedies quick witted, scene changing, surface level stuff. Like SNL or MTV, we don't even want to say the full names of the shows. British movies are different. They let you agonize in the uncomfortable situations, the funny ones and the heart warming ones and the tragic ones, for way more than two seconds. You just sit in it. It's brutal.
"About Time" is like that. It has some humor and some romance. But it also has a heavy dose of profound conviction. (At least it did for me.) Kind of like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" meets "Dead Poets Society".
I don't know if I recommend it. It is rated R and is kind of slow at times. But it has its cute and funny moments, and it received pretty good reviews. Mainly, though, I liked it, but I don't know how good it is. I do know that it shifted me. I was going along through life and this movie came along and pushed me off my trajectory. Probably was worth the $3 rental.
