“Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side.” ~The Talmud

I have long been a doer, measuring my days and my self worth by what was accomplished. Raising my four kids was a continuous exercise in multi-tasking, racing between activity drop-offs and pick-ups in a complex and ridiculous mania. I was forever late for something and never really in time. Aging cures you of this disrespect for time I have learned. I don’t have enough adrenaline to waste it on precise scheduling and in the end, having a child waiting gives them a chance to reflect.

Even as I have given into a slower pace and a need to forgo multi-tasking for paying attention to one thing at a time, I remain attached to the belief that life will go according to plan. I am attached to how long I believe something should or will take and resentful when life continues at its own pace. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I am proven wrong by the timing of the universe, I continue to plan and insist on my own time.

Case in point, I have worked for months to launch our new Good Clean Love brand. I’ve juggled, in my ever so practiced way the designers, vendors and cash to launch the ship for the huge natural product show in March. Sidestepping obstacles, pushing onto the next detail, stressing about the days passing by and the deadlines to meet. Then today, the train stopped, events out of my control set a whole new timeline. Life again is the leader and I am only a humble passenger. Of course, it is not the end of things although it feels like my insides are caving in. Just another lesson that time is not ours to manage, just ours to enjoy if we are smart enough.

The truth about time is that it is the only resource that is doled out equally and that we each use to our benefit or failure. Once again, I got to learn the lesson, so well captured by Paul Bowles, when he said, “We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”