On having no time

I just have time for a quick note this morning before I set off on my typical twelve-hour day of meetings, clients and class.

I have been thinking a lot about the passage of time, how short life really is, and the way we spend our time. I think seeing my husband only for an early morning goodbye kiss when he leaves for work and a goodnight kiss when one of us comes home late at night while the other is still in bed might have something to do with it. On good days, we get to eat dinner together at 9 PM before we both retreat to our computers to finish our work for the night. I know this is a necessary time in our lives to get to where we want to be, but I don't love it.

Is my time best spent in endless meetings and three hour classes? What exactly is all this "work" I need to do everyday? What purpose is it all serving? Some of it is useful, either to me or to someone else, but some of it simply is not worth the time spent doing it. Not that I have a choice in the matter right now. And I will probably always have to do pointless work to some degree, but I hope I can do it more mindfully and balance out its utility and importance with the time I spend doing it.

It's a small, scary world.

You may have read about six-year-old Cole Puffinburger. He was kidnapped last week from his home in an awful, drug-related attack in Las Vegas. This all happened literally one street away from my brother-in-law's house and two streets from my mother- and father-in-law's house. As in, Google the street name (I found it on the Review-Journal's story) and their streets are in the same close-up screen. Add to this the fact that my mother-in-law teaches kindergarten and could have been Cole's teacher if he had lived on the other side of a street. And Cole's father was in the same graduating class from high school as Peter. These are, quite literally, the people my husband grew up with.

Thanks be to God, Yaweh, Gaia, Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whomever else you'd like to thank, Cole was found perfectly unharmed and is safe now. Sadly, I think he is in the minority for missing children. I seriously cannot believe that he is OK and that they found him so quickly (relatively speaking).

The most frightening part of this for me is that my in-laws want to leave. They already have a house in Michigan waiting for them. But the housing market in Vegas is so awful, they can't leave. They say it seems like everyone on their street is just waiting for their chance to put their house on the market. What if they can't leave in time? What if the neighborhood just keeps deteriorating and there is no option to leave? This scenario has played out in many other cities hundreds of times through history, no doubt, but that never makes it less frightening for those living it.

Do five people read this? Here's hoping!