Time in a Bottle

When I was young, I remember my father playing the song “Time in a Bottle” when we were in the car. At the time, I did not get the song. I thought it was stupid. Of all the things to put in a bottle, why would someone pick time? I would have picked a lightening bug or root beer, but that was just me. As I grow older, I am beginning to understand the significance of this song. The chorus of the song says, “But there never seems to be enough time/To do the things you want to do/Once you find them.” This has become incredibly true for me. I have finally decided that I want to go back to school because I want more out my life than just the mundane, but now, I have a wife and a son, and it is hard to spend enough time with them while going to school full time and working full time. I have found the thing I “want to do” but as the song says, “There never seems to be enough time.” It is hard not to be down when I think of the time I am missing out on with my son, but I try and remind myself that I am building a better life for us. Once I graduate, my wife will have the ability to stay home with our children which is something she strongly desires to do, so I know all this time away from her and my son will pay off in the long run, but it seems so far away that it is hard to get excited about. That is what makes time such a tricky thing. On the one hand, I would love time to slow down, so I can savor these sweet moments with my son while he is still tiny and innocent. On the other hand, I would love for time to speed up, so I could be finished with the stress of balancing school, family, and work. It is a paradox. It is a similar concept for those people who write a bucket list. People who create a bucket list write down a list of things that they want to do before they die. The irony of it is that most people spend more time deciding what they want on their list than they do actually living out the items they have picked. My wife is always commenting about things she wants to do before she dies. One day I told her she should write all of them down, and she told me that she did not want to take time out of her living to figure out what she wants to do while she is dying. This is another paradox of life. The moment we start living, we also start dying. If this was not so, then we would not have to stress out about the concept of time. This is why phrases like “carpe diem” have garnered so much attention. We must seize the day because we do not know what the next day holds. We cannot catch time in a bottle, so we must focus on living today.