Where do you find time?

Where do I find time? Karen asks me to tell her when I find the answer. I guess many of you are also have the same question. We can look under rocks, in old storage chests, in our savings box, under our beds, in closets and I will bet we will not find time there. Like a little child playing a game, time is playing hide and seek and you are trying to find her. However, no matter how hard you look you cannot find time. Is time hiding, or have we just not saved enough to find? Time is a very elusive creature. We may find her when we don’t want her only to lose her when we really need her.

Harvest Time – By Kimberly Strothman

Orange, red, yellow, green. The colors gently falling,
billowing in the wind. The smell of dry leaves, barbeques, musty air
finding that time in our hearts for quiet contemplation
Harvest time is here.

What if the most important time to find is not outside but inside? Perhaps you may never find the time out there. The truth is that time out there is not ours to control. You can’t stop the world or even your clock. Time inside is a different story. Time inside is yours to control. Time for reflection, time for love, time for caring, time for compassion, time for thinking, all of these times lie inside us. Yet we spend most of our time looking outside. Who has ever found patience or compassion looking outside? We have limited time outside but unlimited time inside.

We spend so much time looking for time outside that we ignore the time we have inside. We have unlimited time in our hearts to care for ourselves and our loved ones. I think of the line that says “iron bars and stone walls do not a prison make.” What bars and stone walls do we construct around time? We fool ourselves into thinking that we live in a prison of time. If we realize that we can control how we look at time, we can find all the time in the world for what really matters. I may have to work from 9 to 5 to make a living but my mind and my feelings are not captured by the time clocks of the world. We create our own prisons for time.

What inside time, can you find today? Where can your mind go today to look for time that it has never gone before? What thoughts and feelings have you ignored? What if you let yourself think the unthinkable or feel the unfeelable? What could you do today that would be so worthwhile that at the end of the day, you would say “this is one of the best days of my life?”