The Chameleon Called Time
Five minutes, when you’re waiting for a verdict, or a diagnosis, or laying upside down in a dentist’s chair with your mouth propped open on blocks, feel eternal. Seconds drip as if distended, each one clinging mercilessly to the one that came before. But five minutes, when you’re reading a beautiful page-turner or playing a game you love or holding a sweet sleeping baby in your arms, fly. The seconds chase each other in a full-out sprint, barely touching as they hand off the baton.
Rarely do five minutes ever feel the same.
Time is a chameleon that sometimes flows and sometimes drags and mostly moves at a speed we do not prefer at the time. We chase it and we curse it as it stretches and shrinks intermittently, ushering us on like an inchworm. We are captives of its pace.
When my kids were little and I would have to go on a recruiting trip for three or four days, the time between departure and return loomed like a bloated whale. In my head, three days was a lifetime. I would convince myself before leaving that when I returned, the three-year-old I’d left behind would have hair all the way down her back, braces on her teeth, and a prom dress on layaway with matching ankle-strap stiletto heels. (Hyperbole is a young mother’s super power.) Every drive to the airport reeked of angst. And the minutes while I was gone? They slow dripped like a leaky bathtub faucet while I watched other people’s kids play ball. If a tournament ended early, I’d do almost anything within my power to get home sooner than I’d planned. Red-eye flights and 4 a.m. wake-up calls were the norm. “I’ll sleep when they’re grown,” I told myself. Time puffed up like a dragon and scorched my peace of mind.
For parents and their kids—and eventually kids and their parents—time is a wild horse that cannot be tamed. The days are sometimes hard, and tedious inside the minutes, but they gallop on despite our fiercest efforts to rein them in. Our kids leave for kindergarten in the morning and come home at the end of the day with a high school diploma in their hands. Where does the middle go? One day our dads are fixing the roof and the next we’re hiding the car keys from them and picking up a walker at the local Medical Mart.
It’s a hurry-up-wait-a-minute cadence.
The way Father Time usually travels when carrying people and things that we love.
Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/
Time may march in uniformity, but that’s rarely how it feels. And though it’s neutral, it often shifts in shade depending on our internal perceptions. Like one of those rugs that appears to be mostly blue when looked at with the lay of the pile from one side of the room and mostly tan when looked at against the grain from the other, circumstances color how time feels. The pace it takes is personal. Time and space shared by two different people can feel massively disparate. A movie flies by for you and drags on for me. Practice, to one player, seems like it just started and to another as if it will never end.
In downtown Oklahoma City where the Alfred P. Murrah Building used to be, a memorial now stands. It is flanked on the east and west sides by two giant gates of time. One gate is stamped 9:01 and the other 9:03. The minute that is missing is the one that changed everything.
Sometimes time soars. Sometimes it hovers. And sometimes it feels like it stops.
It’s July today, and the air is 110. But it feels like yesterday was Christmas and the day before that was Halloween. When we look at time over our shoulder, it’s hard to fathom where it has gone. It’s elusive like that. Hard to pin down, hard to accurately measure, and even harder to know what to do with because we never know how much of it we have.
P.S. Time Passages