I have shared that the last few months have moved uncharacteristically slowly for me.  I’ve been thinking about that, wondering less about why (that seems clear) than about what I can learn from this unusual slow down in life’s pace.

I suspect that the message is: notice your life.

I’ve certainly learned lately in abrupt, even violent ways, about how fraught everything is on our lives, about the way we daily walk the border between normal and extremely not-normal.  It’s a short hop from awareness of life’s fragility to remembering anew that all we have for sure is now. I wrote about this many years ago: how sheer the veil is between this life and another. I wrote and thought about it then.  I know it now.

There’s a reason I’ve long said that if I ever got a tattoo, it would say “be here now.”.  As life’s crawled by since November, I find myself thinking about those words often.  I wish I could say I’m here, and present, and engaged, but the truth is I’m the same person as I was before everything skidded off the rails.  As aware as I am of time’s markedly slower passage, I am often still distracted, elsewhere.  This always feel dissonant, of course, but lately, even more so.  The persistence of life’s slowness has been nagging at me.  This new pace doesn’t seem to be changing, and it seems to be pulling my attention to it.  I’m sure it holds a lesson for me.

Time and its speed is a funny thing.  It’s clear I’m supposed to be paying attention to this right now.  Last week, one evening, I sat at my desk and watched the world burst into incandescence.  This was unexpected after a day of clouds and rain.  But the light was so notable that I watched it, and while I’ve seen many sunsets from my office window, this one was different.  The clouds were lit from below.  I shared a photo on Instagram here.  Also, and what struck me even more, was that the clouds were moving faster than I’ve almost ever seen.  I should have taken a video, it was that fast.

I opened my window and knelt in front of it, spellbound, taking photos and watching.  It was over in a few minutes.  And that made me think of speed, again: even in a life that’s slowed-down, there are moments that fly by.

Life flies and it crawls, and in the space between these extremes we live our ordinary days.  For whatever reason – actually I suspect I know exactly the reason – this seems to be something I need to remember right now.  Time’s always struck me as a sticky, elastic, complicated thing, both profoundly linear and irrevocable and deeply non-rational and full of pockets, potholes, and switchbacks.  That’s never been more true than right now.

And so I do the only thing I know how to do: begin again.  Look out the window.  Take a deep breath.  Think about my father and my father-in-law. Watch my children, who basically leave trails behind them because they’re moving so fast. Notice things. Be here now.