Time Enough for Love

I've had this post running around in my head since Thursday and I've been trying to find time to get it up here, it appears I've finally found the time.

Back on Thursday I had a couple of things happen in my life that made a fairly significant impact on me.

The first is that my mother found out that the clock that's been on pause for the last two years has started ticking again. Apparently her large tumour is growing again and has started shifting around in her abdomen putting pressure on some of her internal organs and causing her a fair bit of pain. Of course with it putting pressure on her internal organs we can expect that she's going to start having some other problems related to that, we don't know exactly what yet and I have to say that I'm not really looking forward to finding out.

Obviously this was a hard thing for me to hear and while it's not unexpected I'm still not sure it's something you can ever fully prepare yourself for. We're still hopeful of course and she's still planning on being at my brother's wedding this summer at the end of July, we do however have to prepare for the event that she doesn't make it. It's going to be a hard couple of months coming up but the things I've gone through over the last couple of months have left we with some tools that will help me through it.

The other thing that occurred was my mother began going through a big bag of photos that my Grandmother had left behind when she passed. My mother was sorting them into groups so that she can pass them along to the appropriate people in the family.

As we were looking through the pictures we found pictures that ranged from 64 years ago when my father was a baby up until about two years ago when my Grandma passed away. There's a tremendous amount of history there and so many of the photos showed my mother when she was young, and healthy, and vibrant. These photos provided some rather memorable documentation of my mother's time in this country as she hadn't been here too long before she met my father.

As we went through the photos she told me who the people were when I couldn't figure it out for myself and told me stories around most of them. Sometimes she smiled, sometimes there were tears in her eyes and I think every emotion in between.

This made me realize that to her those photos weren't taken years ago in some distant history, rather they were taken a heartbeat ago. To her it was yesterday, she remembers quite clearly those people, and times and places, and sometime between this heartbeat and the previous one all those years have passed.

When I realized this I also realized that it's happening to me, that my heart is beating and that one day I'm going to wake up and realize that I'm on my deathbed, that things are soon to end and I'm going to wonder what happened to the intervening years.

Listening to her talk about the pictures also reminded me that those intervening years won't be measured as such. While I'll tell people how many years it's been I myself won't think of the time that way. Rather I'll measure the time in love, I'll measure it in the time I spent doing the things I love and I'll measure it in the time I spend with the people I love. Those two things above all else will hold space within me and will imprint themselves on my soul, sometime between this heartbeat and the next.

I also realized that I've been waiting, for some reason I've been waiting. I'm not waiting because I have to, I'm waiting because I choose to. The challenge that I'm encountering is that I've just realized how little of that waiting actually needs to occur.

I've been waiting until I have a better job.
I've been waiting until I'm healthy.
I've been waiting for people, and places, and times.

So much of this waiting has been nothing more that fear and procrastination, fear that I might fail, fear of what other people might think, fear of rejection, fear, fear, fear.

Well as of today I'm done with fear and I'm done with waiting.

While I understand that sometimes you can't have it all right now I also understand that there's a difference between a reason to wait and an excuse and as of today I'm done with the excuses.

After all, life is only a single heartbeat long and I don't want to lay there afterward and find that I'm still waiting and I'm out of time.

Till next we meet. . .