The Gift of Limited Time

The last week of the year is also the longest. I take a red pen out of the drawer to mark a December day off on the calendar, then shrug and put the pen back. I am uncertain of the date or the day. In a while I will check---reconfigure my sense of time---but for now it feels unimportant.

We have nowhere to go today and nothing to do. The normal pressure and busyness of our schedule, of which we love to complain, are absent, and we drift through grey, indoor hours, befuddled sailboats in the doldrums between Christmas and the new year.

The 3-year-old lives this way all the time. At the moment he is eating his breakfast with a tasting spoon. In between bites he makes believe that the spoon is a jet plane, careening through the air over the kitchen table. Next he tries sticking the narrow edge of the spoon through the gap in his front teeth. It gets stuck there. He cries to be rescued, blows me a kiss in thanks, then asks me to peel him an orange. He will be eating breakfast until lunchtime at least. He does not know the meaning of hurry; if he did, he still could not do it.

But even this week time peeks over my shoulder, reminding me that it travels faster than any plane, with no hope of return. I have finally gotten around to hanging pictures of the children along the stairwell leading up to their bedrooms. Their mischievous smiles stay suspended on the walls, held in time the way I often wish, but their growing bodies thunder up and down those same stairs, never static, never silent, so much older already than when the shutter clicked. When I kiss their heads, an intimacy they will soon not allow, they no longer smell like babies.

The tolling of the year makes time press down, this unseeable, untouchable thing, so often the realest force in our lives. I have often mourned the passing of a year. Have you? Its wasted hours. Its untaken paths. Its untasted enjoyments. I have yearned for time to be endlessly renewed.

But it's good, isn't it, that time is limited? Ask any writer. The power of time lies in its finitude. Limited time makes a customer seize an opportunity before it is gone. No author's plot is complete with a timing device--a ticking bomb, a kidnapper's deadline, the expiration date on a magic spell--that raises the stakes for the hero, impelling them to act in new, surprising ways.

I am beginning to accept that I am not immune to this reality, and that I can harness it. Time is the resistance that makes us strong, the wind that fills our slackened sails. The very best thing about time is that we have so little of it. Time runs out, and we cannot get more. And that is the drop of gall that sweetens every human hour.

In 2024 I'm laying aside the notion of resolutions. I want only to make my peace with the gift of limited time. To embrace what matters and loose my grip on the rest. To start only what's worth finishing. To write the chapter that comes next, one word, one given hour, at a time.