Time

I just finished the memoir Signs of Life by Natalie Taylor. I smiled, cried, and found myself relating to so many different aspects of her story. This is kind of crazy because she loses her husband in a freak accident while pregnant with their first child. None of these events are close to the stories in my life; however, her words still seemed to strike chord with my emotions.

As I read the final chapters, she wrote about the pace of life and how people view time.

"I am beginning to see that people my age and younger have no sense of time. Women think a year is a long time from engagement to wedding. We expect things to happen overnight. We want to be rich and famous and accomplished in the first few years out of college. We get frustrated when things don't move at an efficient pace. We curse the Internet when it takes more than ten seconds to load a website and we get annoyed that the voice mail lady takes so damn long to give us instructions... My guess is if people in their mid-twenties had any concept of time, not as many of us would be promising a lifetime to a person we met four months ago."

I know that is a lot to digest, but it couldn't be more true. We live in a fast-paced world, and patience is often hard to find. But I really think it's more than that. We can't blame technology for this one. Learning to be patient is not new to mankind.

Time is a funny thing. We want the weeks to zoom by and the weekends to stand still. We search for something we believe will never come, and when it does, it's often taken for granted in the sense that we begin looking towards something else. There is a total discontent when, in fact, we should be soaking up each moment. I know this is a very overused phrase, but I believe it's true. The times when I really take each day for what it has to offer, are when I am most content - most happy.

So, what did I take from this passage? Things don't happen overnight. We don't know what tomorrow has to offer, but we have the promise of today. Our contentment stems from making each day count, but just one at a time.