Time is on my mind

It has been years and years since I have had this much time to do whatever I wanted day in and day out. Of course I have some nonnegotiable responsibilities such as taking care of the dogs and the kids...probably should have written that in opposite order. And of course there are the standard house and home duties such as cooking, cleaning and other such nonsense. But overall, I have a lot of free time that I have to organize and do something with. It is a slightly overwhelming concept. It is a lot of responsibility to have no demands on your time. Sounds ludicrous I realize, but it is a major burden to shoulder to be totally in control of your own time schedule.

I didn't realize there was so much time in the day. Up until very recently I have owned at least one business, and usually had one or two additional contracts going on at the same time. My days were filled with running from one task to another. A good day meant only five items on the to-do-list carried over to tomorrow. Between raising kids and working it seemed the norm to just keep slogging each day to try to get more done then the previous one. I was immersed in the belief that the amount of time available was controlled by the amount of stuff that needed to get done. But I have come to learn that concept may not be true.

Time may indeed be controlled by a force outside of our world as we know it. How else could the drive that takes an average 12 minutes take a half an hour the morning you leave the house late. Or how can a day suddenly be gone and you realize you have not done anything productive, unless you count making an entire batch of cookies to replace the one you ate watching morning TV. The one that gets me the most is how the hours can take so long to pass the day you are putting off going for your morning run. On a larger scale, it is a confusing act of space and time that suddenly our little tiny children can look like the adults they are so quickly becoming, but yet an evening of homework, dishes and bedtime can take an age to end.

I don't know what the trick is to the mystery of time. I don't know why my favorite songs have become "blast from the past classic hits", I don't know how it is my 25 school year reunion in a couple years, but yet I have not managed to get to cleaning out that kitchen drawer  that has everything from corn holders to a child's grade four report card.
The only thing I do know is that I want to live every moment of it, appreciating both the slow and the quick moments of time.