Awash and wear

There is never enough time; there is too much of it, when you are caught up in something you do not wish to do or when there is something you would rather be doing, or there is too little of it, as when you are doing something you have looked forward to doing and something else you do not particularly relish manages to butt in ahead of you in your priority line.

You envy such men and women who are able to live beyond time; there is something in their faces, perhaps a serenity, perhaps an ongoing sense of pleasure resident just below the surface, suggestive of their having stumbled upon some secret.  In fact, they have stumbled upon something, a belief system in a philosophy that, if you were to investigate, you would call a religion or some concept ending in an --ism.

Although you envy them the look and the serenity, particularly those expressions you see on the faces of Buddhist monks and nuns, you have no wish to joint them in the thing that allows them the serenity on their faces.  You would be willing to wait for a dental appointment or even a bus with such individuals, you would hope to find within yourself the bravery you see within them, you would even hope to stand with them when they stood for basic human rights in the face of intolerable oppression, but you would not care to go home with them.

In its most dramatic sense, you are as entwined by time as you are by the need to work for a living; your activities are in spite of time as opposed to because of time.  You get things done or partially done relative to your ability to negotiate settlements, carve out small spaces of time during which you can work furiously or at least purposefully.  You have made similar negotiations with your lifelong tendencies toward sloth and procrastination.

There was a time during your ongoing negotiations with time when you had a resident bitterness and frustration over the fact that you felt you lacked sufficient time to do what you wished.  Of course that was rationale.  Of course you would not have been satisfied had you found the discipline and energy to do the things you wished.  The sheer impossibility of things is your true friend as opposed to the need to be accepting and realistic.  If you are anything, you are not realistic.  You are in metaphor a stubborn man in a small kayak, afloat on a vast, frothy stream of sheer impossibility, your oars of questionable quality.  In time, you will become awash.

But not yet.

Not just yet.