There is an episode in the show The Office where Michael Scott has fallen asleep at his desk. While he is asleep, the staff walks to every clock in the office and changes the time to 5:00. They make a loud noise that wakes him from his nap. He walks out of his office and realizes the clock says it's 5:00 and tells everyone they can go home for the day.
It would be so nice to do this at work. Change all the clocks so that you can go home an extra 2 or 3 hours early. It would be nice to not only do this at work but just in life in general.
It's a curse and a blessing to be an intuitive person. To know something is going to happen but know you don't have a hand in the matter. Knowing there is not a digital clock of your life that you could go and change the time so that what you know will happen, happens.
In the office episode, they made it appear that is was 5:00 but the truth is that it wasn't. It wasn't time to go home, it there were still hours in the work day. If this had been a real scenario, they would have come back to work the next day having to stay and endure the real 5:00. The wait for the real 5:00 would have been more painful, slower than normal.
As badly as I want to manipulate real time and speed up certain processes, I have to tell myself to stop. I tell myself to chill and trust in the real timing. I have to tell myself to live in the moments that are placed before me. I have to allow laughter to come from the bottom of my stomach. I have to allow the tears to fall hard. Each moment is a gift and time is going to run out before we know it. Promises will come. Our dreams will come to pass. I just don't want to spend my life wishing for good things and miss all the good that is laid before me each day.
I keep reading metaphors about sowing, plowing, and growing. I've been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Spiritual Emerson. For a man who wrote over a hundred years ago, he gets me. He says this, " There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till."
I was counseling a student today and I found myself telling him something that I needed to hear myself (as a find myself doing many days). I told him that we live in a world where instant gratification is expected. We expect to overcome the biggest hurdles and mountains in our lives over night. We are very slow to give time and energy into things, we want them taken care of immediately. But what we miss with instant gratification is the joy and freedom that comes when you give something time. When you allow time into working a problem, you find that you heal more permanently, you walk away with a purer joy than you would with instant gratification.
I can't play with time. I have to trust that it knows what it's doing and that I do not have a clue. Time will not always be easy to deal with, but I can't help but believe it's worth trusting in.
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