New dryer works no better than the old; still finishes its own life cycle hours, sometimes days, sooner than I’m ready to take the clothes out. The propane heater in the frameshop went out; petulant because I shoved a chair at it, and insisting that I get down on my hands and knees in supplication to hold the pilot light button down for five minutes before it would relent, relight.
Things, like people, need their time. Require your own involvement in their space if they’re neglected. The heater took me five minutes out of my own time and space to spend instead within its own. I was not here then, but there at that time in my life. Those five minutes are irreplaceable, irretrievable because they’re gone into the past. My path within that span of time and space was changed. The dryer too, will now require my own time spent in ironing because the clothes have sat in tumbled pile and grown wrinkles in that time–the same time segment I spent elsewhere. But the ironing will require a different path into a space and time I hadn’t planned on being in and on, sometime in the future.
Funny, isn’t it?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I wonder, sometimes, if we lined up all our minutes how surprised we’d be by the number of them that get spent frivolously without intent. If we knew (really knew) that those minutes are lost forever, you would think we would budget more carefully. Instead, it seems we always race to snatch the next minute out of the air in front of us. Reaching for what we already have in abundance. Or not.