As the Summer Solstice arrives, I am meditating about time, and how I think and feel about time.  At this holiday, I’m beginning a new relationship with time.

Time.  Do you ever think about your relationship with time?  If you’re like me, you never have enough time.  You’re always running out of time.  Time slips away.  Time flies.  I waste so much time.  I’ll have time to do “it” – whatever it is – tomorrow – which never comes.  We have a thousand platitudes about time.

Remember Seasons of Love from the musical Rent?  We all have 525,600 minutes in a year.  That sounds like a lot of minutes, until we realize we only have 60 of them in an hour.  Jimmy Buffett sings “…maybe 60 good years, it’s really not that long a stay…” in his great song Cowboy in the Jungle.

I’ve realized recently that I’m old.  I don’t know when or how the hell I got here, but here I am.  Those 525,600 minutes and 60 good years mean more to me now than they ever have.  Time is running out, and I’ve got some things to do, some choices to make.

So here’s my plan for my new relationship with time:
* Live consciously, with an awareness of every minute.  Am I doing what I want or need to be doing right this very minute?
* Remind myself that how I live every minute is a choice.  This is hard, especially when we feel trapped in an unpleasant job, for example, but we really do have a choice.
* Find a balance between living in the moment and planning for the future.
* Spend more time with the people in my life I really love.
* Release possessions that no longer hold meaning for me.  Decluttering frees me to do something other than clean and sort!
* Watch more sunrises and sunsets.  Walk on the beach.  Swim.  Talk to the trees and birds and squirrels.
* Contemplate what really matters to me, what I really value, and then act to live more authentically with what matters.
* Make a to-do list with a realistic timeline of goals I want to accomplish (books to be published, other I want to finish, pilgrimages I want to take, etc.)
* Follow through on that list of goals!!

On this day of the longest span of light for us in the Northern Hemisphere, Earth begins her spin away from the light. From today until the Winter Solstice in December, the amount of light each day begins to lessen.   The opposite, of course, is true for the Southern Hemisphere.

Light becomes more and more valuable to me as I grow older – both physically and metaphorically.  Each day, imperceptibly, the amount of sunlight lessons as we travel through time from Summer Solstice to the Autumnal Equinox to the Winter Solstice.  What matters, I think, is what I choose to do with each minute of both the light and the dark of these days – living in gratitude and awareness that each moment is a gift I’ve been given.

Blessed be,
Deb

P.S. – My Deb & Friends Quest for Connection Podcast episode had a problem uploading, so a CORRECTED version is up beginning on Wednesday, June 20 at 9 pm eastern on http://www.blogtalkradio.com/questforconnection

and beginning Thursday, June 21 on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/deb-and-friends-quest-for-connection/id1330237467?mt=2

Text and photo copyright Deb Bowen