Time slows

Annnnnd, now it's the end of February. Seriously Time, you are welcome to slow down anytime now.

I take deliberate action to slow time down. Too many things in my life speed it up: blog reading, internet (who am I kidding: Pinterest) searching, hitting refresh on Facebook way too many times to be socially acceptable. These things all speed up and suck time. At the end, I feel lost that it's so late, wondering where it went. TV is another bad one. Sure, we don't have cable. But there are an awful lot of shows online and we keep track of a whole slew of them.

Other things take up necessary time. It's neither sped up or slowed down, it just is. After EVERY meal, I gotta do the dishes, wipe down the high chair and the table and any other surface Isaac's grubby hands have touched. Then I usually sweep the kitchen floor because otherwise he thinks that's where to find seconds. Or I step in sticky oatmeal. Gross. Laundry, putting endless piles of toys away, sorting shoes, brushing teeth. It is what it is.

But when I have the opportunity to slow down time, I take it. Right now, I'm sitting at the kitchen table as batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies goes into the oven. This slows down time to a delicious, tantalizing tick tock. Baking cookies reminds me of wholesome goodness, of simple pleasures, of the reason I'm baking them. It smells of my childhood and I hope it will one day smell of Isaac's too. This kind of time ties the past, the present and the future. And at the moment, no matter what else I have on my plate, it's pushed to the side while I watch the cookies flatten and stretch and the chocolate chips melt. And it's good.

Time slows down when I take Isaac to the park, and I just watch. It's so easy to direct him: play here, try this, walk that way. Now we swing, we dig sand, we watch the puppy or the airplane. But when I sit back, he does just fine on his own. And I get to enjoy the pure pleasure of watching my son explore his world. As long as he doesn't eat too much sand, I think we're OK.

I find the same time-slowing pleasure in a good book, sitting on the grass watching the world go by, taking a refreshing swim on a hot summer's day, drinking coffee and reading the Saturday paper, having coffee with a friend, the cool pause at the top of a hike.

Maybe if I stop pinning my dream life, I'll find more time to create these stretched out moments that make life memorable. It's a good motto for March: stop pinning, start living.