Why is everyone always in a hurry? Our favorite phrase is “I don’t have time!”  Can we find time? Can we make time? Time marches on, doesn’t it? 

You hurry in the morning, feeling guilty if you have to take extra time for anything. You need to rush. The clock is ticking. You take a shower because it’s faster than a bath, then grab something from the closet, anything, and put it on so you can go.

The highway is crowded with other people in a hurry. They will run over you unless you hurry. It seems as if the whole world is 30 minutes late.

Rushing to get things done, marking them off the “to do” list so you don’t forget anything. You try to prioritize in case you don’t have time to do everything. You rush though lunch if you have time to eat lunch. At the end of the day, it’s time to fight the rush hour as people in a hurry try to get home.

Meals in minutes, microwave meals, fast food — you have to hurry. Dinner is done and email is checked, it’s time to relax, but who has time?

So, you go to bed and get up the next day, still tired, to do it all again. “Thank God it’s Friday,” everyone says. Friday flies by and the weekend is here. But Saturday finds you cleaning house, buying groceries, paying bills, and running errands.

You don’t have time to watch TV. So you record it to watch later when you have time. But you probably never will.

Life is a rat race, or a hamster wheel.  We run as fast as we can but never get anywhere. We spin our wheels and only dig deeper into the rut. The world is spinning out of control. How do we slow things down?

“Take time to stop and smell the flowers,” the saying goes. You think you saw some flowers at the supermarket, but you were in such a hurry to get to the milk, you’re not sure.

We have deadlines to meet. Life is full of appointments. Run here, run there. Try to be on time. Don’t be late. If you miss an appointment, you are wasting time.

Start your engines. Go round and round. It never ends. You need to hurry as you have places to go, things to do. Life goes by like the rush of the wind. There is no time to look back, only forward. You can’t worry about the past, as you hurry into the future.

“Run, run, as fast as you can.” Don’t fall down. You are afraid to stop. If you do you might not be able to start again. Even vacations go by fast, planning, scheduling, and traveling. Hurry up and have fun. We never see the daylight, much less the sunset.

One of these days we will all wind down and wonder where life went, measured out by the clock’s second hand in busy days, busy hours, and busy minutes. And we can’t see a thing we’ve done, only the things left to do.

We want to slow down, but don’t know how. We wonder why we are always tired. But we don’t have time to wonder about it for very long.

Chow, so long, giddy-up, adios partner, see ya later, gotta run, time’s a wastin’, hurry-up and git ‘er done, no time to say goodbye.

Copyright 2012 Sheila Moss