Your Reality is Now
“What time is it? Does anybody really know?” Spoonful or two of sugar is rushedly sprinkled on a freshly poured bowl of cereal. A Dior rouge lipstick makes its way to a sensuous pair of inviting lips. A selected key opens the lock on the gardeners tool shed. Shoelaces are firmly tied. Two aspirins and a gulp of water taken for headache relief. Second by second the vignettes of life churn.
It takes a minute filled with seconds to perform a simple task like pouring a cup of coffee. Like seconds; minutes are beaming with possibilities. Time is sectioned off and contains everything we do. Stop a minute! What are you doing right this very moment, besides reading this? There were seconds, minutes, and perhaps hours that preceded it. Time is an asset loaded with realities that should not be squandered.
A single minute of our lives is rarely measured properly. As sure as hours lead to days, days lead to weeks, and weeks lead to years. Time is an equal arbiter that is never merciful. A sleepless night is never regained, it’s lost forever.
“Time steals from itself when no one’s looking.”
Rod Jones Artist
Time partners with stress and anxiety and creates an uncomfortable reality in the now. It’s a now, that is stolen away from happiness. Happiness and joy massages time into contentment. The realities of a mind that thrives in peaceful contentment can and should be yours.
Your reality is now. Reflect back on a minute and see what you discover. Do we measure our days with productive minutes or do we often surrender them to meaningless thoughts and events.
“Time is an equal opportunity ravisher,
seizing on those that squandered it.”
Rod Jones Artist
Think about a movie you have watched. The movie is compressed time. You never see the characters participating in the daily routines that are essential to living. Do they relieve themselves in a restroom? A cab ride across Manhattan takes little more than a dozen frames of the camera. In fact, all travel is compressed. Could you watch an hour or two of the principal characters sitting on a transatlantic flight? You would change the channel or leave the theater, it would be boring and intolerable. Action movies thrive on eliminating every useless minute in the lives of the characters. You will never see them grooming themselves for hours just so they can hop on a motorcycle and be chased or chase someone across the top tiled roofs of a city in Turkey.
Our lives are constant reminders of the realities we live. Minutes and more… are wasted, not necessarily by the choices we make. We live as humans with needs, wants and of course desires. Rarely is this time ever analyzed. We’ve all said to ourselves and others, “That was sure a hell of a waste of time.” Retrospectively, you would go back and rethink, or reuse that time more productively. It’s terribly difficult to anticipate the loss of time. Once it’s gone it’s gone forever.
We have all sat in a drive-through restaurant, more often than not with our stomachs growling, stressing over the fleeting time that is preventing us from satisfying our hunger. Especially when there are whining children in the backseat, who are equally as hungry. We all complain about the lack of time when we don’t get our way.
Give yourself a minute or two, or three, and think back how many of those precious minutes that obligated us to burn up premium time on some of the most mundane tasks.
I’m saddened to report that our lives may have been designed to use a certain amount of time frivolously. There seems to be a comfort zone in wasted time inside of our heads. It may be a form of relaxing our onboard mental computers.
Every life is filled with thousands of vignettes. I had a male friend in high school that always put his hands in his pockets, leaving his thumbs out. He always seemed to do this when he was in a conversation with a group of people. For some reason I had always associated him with his hands in his pockets; thumbs exposed. Many, many dozens of years later I ran into him in a grocery store. As he stood there chatting with me, his hands went into his pockets, thumbs out. This is a vignette that apparently is trapped in time. I doubt that he knows when or why he started doing this, and it’s completely harmless, but it did create an association to anyone who is keen enough to make that observation.
No one can think of a loved one, friend or relative that did not do or say something that seemed to be a natural part of their demeanor. I remember my dad’s hands, and I remember the ring he wore, it’s an image that is pressed into my mind and has a life of its own, but it’s also part of his life’s reality.
Your reality is now: every day is catalogued in your memories. Time is encapsulated in your thoughts second by second. No two realities are alike. My minutes are not your minutes. My minutes can become your minutes through observations and will most likely endure in your reality. They do not need to be profound to make an impression. A simple gesture, a habit or the inflection of a voice, can, and often does become a hand-me-down reality, bringing with it a remembrance of someone you can no longer observe.
“A shared thought is magical when
not hobbled by reality.”
Rod Jones Artist