Enough Time

Hanging in my bedroom is a picture I gave my husband long before he was my husband that says, “Everything changed the day he figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in life.”

This picture is part of a line of art called Story People by Brian Andreas that asks viewers to imagine a world that can tell the story of how beautiful life is and celebrate that.

I find myself wondering about the story of this person who has gained this wisdom, how they begin to live after. What does this mean for their particular “to-do” list, all the adulting that has to happen to keep the wheels of life greased? Is this wisdom something that they figure out and forget, over and again sliding back and forth between knowing and unknowing?

When I gave this picture to my then boyfriend, I imagined a world where life could be this intentional. I imagined a purposeful life, one that added beauty to the world. I don’t know that I could have named a lot of specifics of how that looked, but I could paint the story in broad strokes and could have said that I imagined a world in which what is really important in life is celebrated in the choices one makes.

It’s an interesting story to reflect on and consider the ways that mid-life me would edit what 26-year-old me wrote. My definition of adding beauty to the world now is quieter, for example, less grand. And how does everything change, really, by knowing that time is finite and what is important is perhaps far more scaled than it once seemed?

I’ll tell you another story about something I see near daily. Each day on my way into the town where I work, I drive past a home with the loveliest flowers.

I don’t know the owner of this home, the one who tends this garden, but I’ve seen them working in the beds as I’ve driven past. This week, I considered the effort that goes into this garden bed. A gardener myself, I know this beauty comes with a price—to time, energy, and money. Who knows what else might be important to this gardener, but this they’ve decided is the kind of beauty that is important enough to say yes to.

There is just enough time each day, I imagine, for what is important in that particular day. How to know what to do with that just enough time? These are the kinds of decisions that we may not know we’re making for others, but I think we are. This gardener’s decision about what to invest in has become a community investment, an investment in my enjoyment of beauty.

So, is there enough time for the important things? I wonder if this is a story of people, not one person, which makes this picture on my wall that much more interesting. Maybe there’s enough time collectively for the important things. I wonder what that story looks like?