Fast Living

These days time melts like hot butter. I just sat and tried to calculate what has happened since I wrote about the allergist, and was amazed to discover that nothing newsworthy has happened. This is remarkable because I'm completely beat.

There's a mystery here that I've been struggling to solve. I'm not sure exactly how it is that when I spent most of my free time getting wasted, I never felt pressured for time; yet now that I'm sober, I never seem to have a moment to spare. Maybe I got buzzed all the time to slow myself down. My trouble is that even when I'm not doing something, my mind is leaping ahead like a hound dog sniffing out the next scent. It wears me out, I guess.

My good friend Ann, the Buddist meditator, has counseled me in her gentle way to slow down, do one thing at a time. It sounds pretty good on paper. She has yet to explain how to do one thing at a time when you have five minutes to do fifty things. I suppose you could try to trim out some of the fifty things, but most of them include last-second requests such as: Find My Wolfie Toy, Where are the Winnie the Pooh Underwear and The Chiropractor Called, Your Appointment is at Eleven.

When I was young my favorite thing was to sit under a shady tree on a nice day and read from a stack of books. I could and did do that day after day. I like things simple and slow-paced. Needless to say, that is not my life today.

But reading books isn't the same as full-impact hugs from a four-year-old boy, or marriage, or answering 911. Life doesn't come and visit you while you're sitting under a tree. I'm tired, but my life is full. I'm short on time, but I'm full on love.