There is an astonishing four minute
video of the progression of life, where a Korean artist begins with a drawing of an infant and changes it to depict her through the decades. The eyes are riveting. I marvel at the way the artist captures each age:
childhood, young adulthood, middle age, grandmother. The eyes stay almost the same.
Life trundles by quickly enough that I lose my bearings. When did I swivel from youthful to matronly? When I look at my twins sometimes I see myself at their age, and am startled to find I became as fluffy around the edges as my mother was in her golden years.
When we know that a difficult period is finite, it can be easier to bear. Going to the dentist, I
sometimes ask how long a procedure will take. Twenty minutes. I can endure a drill for twenty minutes. Labor felt like it went on forever, and like most birthing women I would beg my midwife to predict how much longer it would take. They were slippery about being reassuring without actually lying.
The souls under the alter in the book of Revelation wailed with the question.
"How long?!?!" They were waiting for the chaos of evil to be
tamed, and harnessed back into hell. I wonder if their entry into heaven felt like it was worth the wait.
Newlyweds can feel like the days are fleeting by faster than they can celebrate them fully. Later years may drag on like a freight train with ninety eight cars. If I can hang on to a sense of the swiftness of life, as I do when I see these four minutes (which I will admit I watched three times) it is easier to keep trying.
