THE MOMENTUM OF TIME

And now another day has flown by me at the speed of light.

There are three major moments of each day, landmarks on which I can tag everything else.

1. Wake up
2. Get off of work
3. Realize it's time to put the kids to bed and call it a night.

The days are of course filled with interesting sights and thoughts, but they blur together sometimes like paintings lining a glass storefront as you pass them on a bus.

And riding across the continent on a Greyhound is something everyone should do. Just sit there and grab hold of layer upon layer of interest in the sights. The world stands still, an art gallery for you, in the speeding grey cylinder, to absorb as much of as you can before it passes you by.

The old woman walking her inevitable poodle - children immersed in the cliche of childhood - the street corners you will never know what it is like to stand on and wait for your ride. Right on that very spot, in that certain shadow, staring at the arrangement of cracks in the sidewalk there - that feeling will remain a mystery, a pixel of color in the panorama of your cross-continental excursion.

All these moving images make it difficult for the mind's eye to focus on just one, and so they become a breathing, moving metaphor, a caricature of memories you never earned - of lessons you may never learn - because you are moving too fast for the lives that you see - and some of them are a lot like your own. Slow time down - beat the clocks - we move this fast and time gets lost.

And now, as my three-part day comes to a close, the children are in bed and my fingers again stop typing with the self-consciousness of one who has said too much too fast.

“... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” -Paul Bowles