Time
Every year, one of my friends sends out a letter for Christmas. She types it out and spends lots of thoughtful time updating her friends and family on everything that is going on in their lives. As a family that lives in a different state without internet or cell service, these letters and our occasional land line phone calls are the only time I get to catch up. I cherish getting the letters and reading them. It’s like I’m taken back to a time and place where this is how people communicated. Something out of pride and prejudice and I’m longing to hear from my sister about how it’s going in “town.”
The only trouble with these letters is that they are several typed pages long. For that reason, when I’m opening my mail, I usually set it aside and tell myself I’ll get to it later. Well friends, it’s September 14th, 2021 and I am just now reading this letter postmarked December 15, 2020. And to top it off, I didn’t want to call her because I wanted to read the letter first. So every time I thought to pick up the phone, I thought about the letter and would say something like “no I’ll read the letter tonight and call tomorrow.”
9 months. Goodness, for all I know she has another kid already.
Time is an interesting thing. I always feel like I never have enough of it and yet I am on season 7 of Friends for the umpteenth time. This letter that I have been avoiding for 9 months took me a very pleasant 30 minutes to read while I drank my morning coffee. It was so simple, so enjoyable, and yet I let it sit to the side just like I leave packages unopened next to the door or my shoes at the bottom of the steps. And honestly, I'm not sure if I have a real lesson this week because I'm not sure if I can or want to get any better at this.
No one is perfect and sometimes at the end of a long day I don’t want to read the mail or put my shoes away, I just want to watch The One with the Embryos and call it a day. And that's okay, as long as I don't give the excuse I didn't have the time. Because we do have the time. There is always time, it's whether or not we choose to prioritize it. So I may always choose to prioritize TV over my shoes, but I hope going forward I can at least let my real friends take a front seat to the gang at Central Perk.
