“Cram as much life as you can into the time you are have”. Upon first glance that sentence seems to be your basic axiom thrown around by social media accounts or plastered on a wall of a conference room. I heard it the other day, probably by one of those aforementioned social media accounts, and it stopped me. I suddenly heard it differently than I had before. Maybe it was just the right time for me to hear it. I felt as though I was above it this time with a much wider view of its intended meaning. At least, its intended meaning to me at that very moment.
Often, we think of life as just the time that we exist here on this plane in these bodies. It is a period of time that spans our birth to our death. As though life is simply the cumulative balance of the time we are alive. That isn’t what life is at all. That may be the definition of our time here, but it surely isn’t what constitutes life.
Life isn’t the passing of time. It is what we fill that time with. Life is our experiences, the quests, the adventures, the moments we create, the risks we take, the loves we have, the heartache we face and the mountains we climb. It is all the moments in between the adventures. When we sit with someone to eat breakfast or suffer a road trip for hours to get to a place we may not even really want to be. It is the driving to the funeral, crying, hugging, loving. It is waiting in the line for the women to count out her change to pay for groceries. It is laying under the sink, water spraying everywhere as you curse and cover yourself in towels. It is the dress, the kids, the movies, and the sand beneath our feet. All those moments are life.
When people can see that the end is in sight, they often want more time. They want the opportunity to live more life. They want to experience more of anything, be it joy or heartache. They just want to keep filling time with things that make them feel. We seek more time because we have regrets about not pouring more into the time we had. When we look back on our life we aren’t doing so with a clock or stop watch. The only place that time has in our lives is to remind us that there are boundaries to this existence. We are granted knowledge of the beginning and have to live with the uncertainty of the end. It is that uncertainty that we should use as fuel to cram as much as we can into the moments we have. It should remind us to be present. To remember to enjoy the sunrises, all of them. To be grateful for both the rain and the rainbows. It takes effort, and we will fall short every day, but we can at least try to be there for as much of life as we can. And let the time figure itself out.