It Happened Last Week

Actually, not a news review but a personal event. For the first time since I moved into my semi-retirement mode I fond myself saying

I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do.

I remember retired people I have known over the years saying that. I always thought it had to do with chores and "To-do Lists." I didn't ever think that time would seem to be going so fast that I had more things I wanted to do than there was time.

Now I get it.

I have several writing projects that I want to work on. There is the music- practicing, rehearsing, and performing. I haven't had a chance to ride mu bike on any trails and take pictures. My every-other-weekend work schedule seems to be more of a chance to gather my breath.

I will admit that some of the problem does lie in a personality quirk that I have never been totally able to overcome: I am not now, and never have been, a natural-born morning person. Most morning people refuse to believe that anyone can't become a morning person. It is real. Even all the years when I did get up early to go to work or whatever, it was not an easy task. No matter the hours of sleep, that alarm was not a welcome thing. Even getting up early does not automatically translate into early to bed.

But when one has to get up in order to get paid, well, you just do it.

Now I'm not paid to get up early. So I do "waste" some otherwise precious time not getting out of bed early enough. If I could just do that I would have more time to get the things done that aren't getting done. I know all the psychological tricks that I can pull on myself to get me out of bed earlier, but they don't work that easily.

Which means, since I seem unable to motivate that earlier time, I will just have to be satisfied with what does- and doesn't get done. Makes sense. But I will keep trying.

Third Sunday in Advent: Believing While Waiting and Not Knowing You're Waiting

In a discussion about faith, religion, spirituality and the like the other evening a moment of insight came to me.

I have never been an agnostic.

Even when I didn't know what I believed, or how it all fit together; even when I was unchurched, semi-churched, irreligious or non-religious, I never doubted the existence of "God." My understanding of "God" has undergone more than my share of transitions, revisions, revolutions and revelations. The breadth and depth of my understanding of God has changed drastically over the years and I know far, far, FAR less about God today than when I was younger. At the same time I am far, far, FAR more convinced of God's presence, grace, love and all those other words I have been posting daily in my picture devotional.

What I came to think about in that discussion on Friday evening was "waiting," which is what Advent is all about. Waiting- and being accepting of where I am at in any given moment of my faith journey. Pilgrimage is how I name it- my movement through my days seeking, in each day, the signs and grace of God. Waiting is not "inaction," which is how we often think of it. Waiting is actively moving forward in the direction of grace. Waiting is knowing that if I am honest I can admit that I don't know all that I need to know.

Waiting is finally realizing that if I ever get to the point where I really, totally, completely understand and can explain God- I have gone off the path- or I have died. Even then I have a hunch that I won't know it all or have all the answers- they just won't  matter any more.

So perhaps I should stop worrying about finding "the answers" now and instead learn to live in the presence and the grace. Yes, we are in the Advent season when waiting is uplifted. But in the waiting, we are still active in God's world. The pictures I have been posting at times have attempted to illustrate that.

The Holy Spirit is still hovering over the depths of the earth whether those are the depths of the oceans or the depths of our human souls. The Holy Spirit continues to inform our waiting and perhaps even illuminate us more deeply.

It was in God's time (Greek- kairos) that Jesus came. It is always in God's kairos, far different from our chronological time, that God gives us the next part of our understanding.

So let's wait and watch and live what we already know.

Grace.

Timely Fun

Looking at the calendar as I was thinking about this post I thought,

Wow, how time flies!

since today happens to be my brother's birthday, 29 days after mine. How time flies! When a birthday shows up, kind of like New Year's Eve, we do that kind of reminiscing. How time flies!

So I Googled the phrase for the fun of it. Here's some of what I came up with:

Time passes quickly, as in It's midnight already? Time flies when you're having fun, or I guess it's ten years since I last saw you—how time flies. This idiom was first recorded about 1800 but Shakespeare used a similar phrase, “the swiftest hours, as they flew,” as did Alexander Pope, “swift fly the years.”
-The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Retrieved August 31, 2014, from Dictionary.com
website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/time flies

Then there was the question, should it be "flies" or "flys?" Some of the answers, other than the red underlining of spell-checker:

Now you know that the plural of "fly" is "flies" and this pluralisation only applies when a word ends in a consonant+y. If there is a vowel before the"y", then you simply add an "s", as in monkeys, moneys, volleys, relays, etc. I know that wasn't your question, but it may help you spell the plurals of hundreds of words.

or

Do NOT, repeat do NOT listen to anyone who says that "flys" is correct at all. Flies is the plural of fly; whether referring to the plural of the insect or the verb form.

Which, I believe, settles that one.

Wikipedia told me something I didn't know:

Funny How Time Flies (When You're Having Fun)" is the seventh and final single from American R&B singer Janet Jackson's third studio album, Control (1986).

Then when you click on images you get, 

of course, the inevitable:

Or a reflection on the simple fact of the relativity of time and a play on the phrase with "old-time flies":

Finally, on another musical note, it is a 1958 single from country and pop singer, Jerry Wallace. So I might as well post that video and take us all back to the 50s so those of us who were around 56 years ago can say it again- how time flies.

Truth Spoken

Patience and time do more than strength or passion.
--Jean de La Fontaine

A (Not Too) Fatal Flaw

(Backstory: I have been exercising before work every work morning since mid-January.  I am now in good shape and planning some participation in a Duathlon at the end of August. It has been one of the neatest and healthiest things I have done in a long time.)

There I sat on Monday morning. It was the first day of our stay-at-home-and-relax vacation. I had slept in but got up when I did so I would have time to take a nap later. I looked out the window and was enjoying the beauty of sun and puffy clouds and ...

What about my exercising? When am I going to do that? How am I going to arrange it in my vacation schedule?

This was not the first time these thoughts had crossed my mind. I had wondered last week how I would schedule my work out times while on vacation. But now I was face-to-face with the reality.

Which raised the flaw (and I am sure not a fatal one) in the workout routine. It is based on getting up early and exercising before work in the morning. The exercise facility is in the building where I work. It is easy and convenient- when I am working. It is not when I am not.

Like Monday- and this whole week.

It is the problem of routines, schedules, doing things at a set time and place. No, I was not about to get up at 5:30 each morning this week to work out.

But then I looked out the window again and said- but it is a nice day. What am I doing in here? Especially since I am planning on doing a fun Duathlon later in the August.

Note: A duathlon, I only found out a couple months ago is a triathlon without the swimming.

It is still three parts, but it is run, bike, run instead of swim, bike, run. 

Since I am not a swimmer and don't plan on being one, other than for fun, a triathlon is out of the question.

I haven't really worked on running a lot in the past 6 months (or 28 years for that matter.) So what better time to really find out than this week when I can run outside and see what happens.  Which is what I did. That and some nice biking. Even with the day trips I have managed to do something except today and this was a good rest day in the training schedule.

Which only proves the old maxim (which is an old maxim because it tends to state an obvious truth:) Where there's a will (or desire) there's a way. It also showed me how much time I really do have at my disposal for different things. All things considered, not bad for vacation.

I have discovered that I am not a good runner. At least not yet. 

I am not sure I am even well-built for running. Only time will tell the truth on that.

But I am signed up for the Team Ortho Minneapolis Duathlon Fun Course

August 29 in downtown Minneapolis. It is a 1.5 mile run, an 11 mile bike, and a 1.5 mile run.

Yes, I may be crazy, but it is my big adventure for this summer. But imagine - scuba diving and a duathlon-

all in one year.

Wow!

This was good to know- we actually do have more time than we used to.....

One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.

This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.
--Best Article Every Day

Time Isn't What It Used to Be

Bob Carlton at The Corner posted the chart at left from The Trend Watch. It shows the length of time it took some technologies to reach the 150 million user mark. Facebook did it in 5 years compared to the telephone which took 89 years.

Take another look at that and you will also see that a mere decade ago, 10 years, neither iPod nor Facebook were even on our radar screens. Today they are two of the most ubiquitous technologies around. What took decades in the past now happens in almost an instant.

I remember a few years ago that people were talking about information doubling every 18 months to two years. Some of that was based on the famous "Moore's Law" which according to Wikipedia,

describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for almost half of a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.

Applying that idea to information it was said that we have more and more information to deal with more quickly. The graph at left also seems to indicate that we have more and more ways to access that information more and more quickly.

So in many ways it appears as if the arrow of time is still moving in only one direction but we are moving a lot faster than we used to. Change is now normal. Lack of change is, well, not normal. We are seeing things develop and disappear more rapidly than ever before. Just because we did it that way 10 years ago (let alone 50 years ago) doesn't mean we will be doing it that way as soon as next week.

I'm not sure where all this leads me today. A week after surgery I am grateful for the speed of change in medicine. In 1958 I had my tonsils removed. They used ether. I stayed in the hospital 24 hours and was in bed at home for a week. A doctor couldn't believe that they actually used ether.

In 1979 my wife had the same surgery I just had. She was in the hospital a week, wasn't allowed in a car (other than to go home) for six-weeks and was told to lie down and not move a lot for the first few weeks. They had me out of bed less than 12-hours post-surgery and home within 30 hours post-surgery. I am already allowed to drive now since I am not on any narcotics. "Walk," they told me. "Walk as much as you can."

So the chart is a framework for a lot of things, not just technologies. Are there dangers? You bet. The ease of lack of privacy is one. So is the ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots; the industrialized nations and the yet-to-be-industrialized nations. We may be overwhelmed by a lot of this change if we do not also maintain our soul. (And I haven't even gone to the impact on the church.)

Having said all that, it is still good to pick up a book and read. Just for fun. Like the sci-fi novel I am working on now about what happens when bio-nano-technology can build new people or rebuild old ones in a time after a cosmic power surge has knocked out technology as we know it today.

Ironic, huh?