2/10/14

Breaths & Heartbeats

My first idea for this post was to write about writing on the bus, how I steal away those brief moments in order to scribble down stories. {No, I type them. Yay for tiny laptops.}

But something else has been on my mind.
Time is made of breaths and heartbeats.
I think sometimes we think of time as an entity in and of itself.
  • I'm running out of time
  • You only have so much time.
  • I don't have time to spend on that.
And while time as a measurement is very handy to the sciences, it's hard to grasp as people. We throw it around like it's an actual thing...except we can't touch it and can't stash it in a safe, so believing that we only have so much, or that it's valuable, is a bit...difficult.
Time is made of breaths and heartbeats.
You know how valuable your next breath is. You know how much your next heartbeat means to you.

That is what your time is: valuable. God does not hand you a gift of time, per se; He gives you the gift of so many heartbeats.

Wasting time? Wasting heartbeats.

Running out of time? Running out of breaths to breathe.

We spend time like it doesn't exist, and, in a way, it doesn't. It's conceptual, somewhere out there, in the clouds. 'Cause, like, time, you know, it's like, dude, man, it's time. We don't think of it as real. Oh, five minutes on Facebook. Well, there are worse things, right?

Seventy-five breaths on Facebook.

Four hundred heartbeats...on Facebook.

Thinking of time--and time spent--this way is changing my perception and impacting my actions. I'm not spending time, I'm spending breaths. I'm spending heartbeats. {Perhaps that Justin Timberlake film was more accurate than we thought.}

I want to make them count.

1 comment:

Cairn said...

Love this! Thanks for adding a new perspective.