TIME after TIME after TIME marches leming like into the past or future?

I have heard of 'fast' time and 'slow' time.  It was explained to me by comparing when you are doing something you love like reading or contentedly listening to music (speaking for myself) which time goes by fast.  For others it might be watching movies or playing video games, watching sporting events or building and creating.  Slow time connected the best with me when I thought of organized wrestling.  There are three periods, each three minutes each.  In the midst of that wrestling with muscles straining against another wrestler time goes very slow it seems, especially in that third period.  

So here it is already four days after Christmas all fast time because it has been so enjoyable.  Between the fun and business of Christmas and the days following also filled with plenty to do it seems that time has passed by quickly.  This time of year I take off from work as much as possible to be home with my family (kids and wife off from school and girls home from college) to talk, play games (which this year was cribbage), after Christmas shopping and this year we replaced our traditional Christmas party with a Christmas open house.  It fit our schedule best to do it after Christmas rather than before.  We used the last half hour of the open house to sing Christmas songs and hymns maybe for the last time this season.

It is always lots of fun to have family and friends to visit.  The Hintons came for the open house which we enjoyed and spent a long time talking even after the singing.  Lori and Brendon came as well and brought some really yummy chicken salad mini sandwiches which I enjoyed many of.

It is a great time of year to put more thought and effort into our family and friends and to me that is what Christmas is all about.  We celebrate the coming of our Savior who taught us the importance of our friends and families.  I'm grateful for all those who are a part of our extended associates.  I recognize how much they mean in my life and am appreciative for them. 

As time goes by it of course becomes our past but doesn't it also greatly influence our future.  How we use our time now helps develop us and shape our future choices so that it not only gives us strength and comfort, or their opposites, from the past but begins the process of laying out and preparing our future.  So time does seem to march both to the past and the future at once.  A paradox?  An oddity?  A reality.

Grieving Dad

I’ve found myself thinking about Dad a lot more than usual the last couple days.  I’ll be at work doing paperwork and then be reminded that he is lying in the hospital and not aware for the most part what is going on around him and fighting for his life.  I’m not sure that he is fighting to keep his injuries from killing him but in this case he is fighting to have a conscious life.  To overcome his injuries so that he can participate in life and not just survive this accident. 

I think about some of the things we’ve done together in the past.  I realized that much of what he and I enjoyed together had to do with eating and playing cribbage or both at the same time.  There are lots of places we have been to eat.  As a matter of fact the last time we were out there in November we went to the Keys restaurant in downtown White Bear Lake and enjoyed breakfast together.  That might have been the first time that Lisa and I took him out to eat instead of the other way around.  Most recently in his weekly email he mentioned that he had found a German Restaurant that he enjoyed and a dish that was one he had last had in Munich.  I thought to ask him when and what he was doing in Munich but didn’t and so I don’t know, and maybe never will.  I did write him a quick email and say I would really like to go to that German Restaurant with him on our next trip out as there haven’t German Restaurants in our area for several years and I love German food.  He agreed we would have to do that.  That likely won’t happen now, at least not for a long time.  He may well not remember that restaurant after his fall. 

Grieving is such an interesting thing.  A person doesn’t have to die for us to grieve them.  We can already miss aspects of our relationship with them as life and age or accident or just change takes those parts away.  I miss these things and fear that we will never enjoy them like we have done for the past many years. 

Grief is not a terrible or harmful thing but rather is the human way of adjusting to changing circumstances that require that we modify ourselves to a new reality or at least prepare for a possible new reality.  It requires changing our expectations and maybe finding pleasure in new or simpler things.  I can do it; I can grieve for Dad and the loss of old times…but not with a smile.  L