Thirty Minutes

We were about five miles out of town when Ron suddenly remembered that he had forgotten his computer. As we were turning around and heading back to the hotel, he said, “This is going to add about thirty minutes to our trip home.”

I thought about this and replied, “What is thirty minutes? If we knew we only had thirty minutes to live, it would seem like nothing.”

“Everything is relative, isn’t it?” He said.

This is where the conversation took a morbid turn, as we motored our way backtracking to where we had just been.

“We feel aggravated when we are told we have to wait thirty minutes for a table in a restaurant, or for a store to open, but we’d feel quite differently to being told we only have thirty minutes before the bomb explodes,” I added.

“Yeah, the trouble is we never know when our last thirty minutes has already begun.”

We gave this weighty concept a reverent moment of silence.

We pulled into the parking garage and Ron dashed out to go retrieve his computer while I granted this topic the opportunity to bloom in my head as I waited.

We’ve heard it before a zillion times. We know the aphorisms about living life as though this might be our last day, gathering the rosebuds while we may, savoring every moment, but we still allow ourselves to get tangled up in the rat race and the time crunch. We say we could use more time but then we rarely use the time we have judiciously. We fall with impudence into time squandering habits and then occasionally complain there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything we have to do.

As we pulled out of the parking garage I asked Ron what he would do with his last thirty minutes if he knew they were upon him. He smiled and said, “Telling you how much I love you.”

Suddenly everything that had threatened to be out of our control came back into focus, like the sun burning through a thick fog.

Regardless how many times or ways we are warned to stop and smell the roses, we are not likely to ever spend our time wisely. This is a given. Humans are simply not hard-wired to appreciate each moment as though it were our last. We lose our perspective instantly as the crush of duty, work and responsibilities push hard against us. Ultimately, even though we are rarely given the opportunity to choose how we would spend our last moments on earth, if we understand that, from beginning to end, no matter how busy we are, loving someone else is the best we can do with the time we have been allotted. Everything else is just busy work.

If we could make someone else feel loved everyday, when our last thirty minutes does come, we will know we have lived our lives about as well as can be expected.