To Make Much of Time
How do we spend our most precious resource?
I grew up attending dinners that my parents hosted in their small Swiss Chalet many times a year. When company visited, Mom set out the fancy plates in the dining room on the multi-leaf pine table that grew or shrunk with the size of the crowd. Her best napkins themed for the season waited with a fold under the knife and spoon. Stemware, mugs, and flower speckled bowls appeared from somewhere. In the kitchen Dad toiled filling every surface with steaming entrees, pureed sides, and thick slabs of bread that once fully prepared turned the corner into the dining room where the guests waited. The table was full: of dishes, of food, of people. I remember very little space. Yet somehow all of it and us magically fit.
Grandparents, neighbors, colleagues, old friends, new friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, current students, former students, community members recently met, exchange students, college roommates and others were welcomed. I remember the groups' collective smiles through a nostalgic sweet and savory haze of dinner's steam filling the room. All ate well, conversed throughout the meal, well past dessert. Many a guest was loathe to leave my parents dining room table so they lingered in each other's company. Most lost track of time. Left hours after they intended.
Time.
This vein of mid 20th century hospitality runs to the heart of Ridges - Hike & Ski Tours. I believe people so enjoyed their time with my parents that they never forgot them, that dining room, this property, the kindness served them at the hands of my parents. In fact I know it. People I had never met before have stopped me in mid-sentence when they connected me in their mind to my parents. Then they proceeded to tell me their recollection of one of those meals that I did not attend being off at college or out of the house in my adult life. Their tale was strange and yet familiar as I have eaten many of those meals.
Susan, Mike and I enjoyed one of those type of gatherings when they took a Ridges Ski Tour this week. On the trail our conversation moved to the natural rhythms of climbs, descents and pauses. In the cabin our words interspersed with the cadence of spoons scraping bowls and clicking glasses toasting our company. I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon and felt it was not quite time enough.
A quixotic paradox of timelessness/not time enough.
Physicists tell us time is relative in the cosmos. It curves, warps, slows, speeds, even runs parallel at the quantum level where two separate beings a parsec apart feel the same thing at the same time. It seems beyond our ken.
But it is not.
Here on earth we can bend our time, accelerate, slow, even stop our time like a German watch behind glass that has not ticked in half a century only to start again when we make much of time, together...
