Mortal moments...

I have moments of mortality. On the hearing, one would assume them to be instants of frailty or fear but they're nothing like that. They are 'step back and see who you are, where, and for now' moments.

I had one today. I was walking home from a friend's house. I approached my white painted, rented porch and there He was. I stood still, right next to Time. I saw the porch not as another seamless step in my ever increasingly stressed existence but as the backdrop of a scene. My backdrop on this set for these days. Out of body? More like the cleansing of my perspective. I've always been aware of Time and his role in my script. And since the day I understood that these eyes were peering out from this soul, I've respected Him. I like Him. His prescence means to me that this is not all and that although we walk well together I will one day be waving goodbye to Him from a distance. He stays, I don't.

My moments of mortality. They very much have defined who I chose to be through all of my steps of life. As a child I knew when an opportunity came to be kind, it was there for me to take. I probably learned that one from my parents or Sunday School. You don't wait for someone else to come along and fill the void. You step towards the opportunity and embrace it. I remember the feeling of regret when I would pass those chances by. I saw Time walk away from me and I was never able to see Him in the same light again. The moment had passed. The regret clung to me as a reminder never to let it happen again. Thus I was a kind kid.

As a suicidal teen I was taunted by Time. He would highlight each tedious task of each moment of each day that would be for the rest of my unending years stuck here. Shower, wake up, study or fail, locker, homeroom, which house to go back to, who to trust, who to follow, who to hate, how to make it all stop, wake up, study, locker, homeroom...and don't worry it won't last forever. After school you can have a job from 9-5 and a mortgage and car payments and taxes, 9-5, mortgage, payments.... I didn't like Time then. He was always there and wouldn't let me think.
But we didn't wave goodbye.. I'm glad now. I wasn't then.

When I became a mother Time dropped the ball. Maybe he got jealous. He would skip minutes at first and then be gone for months. When I felt him again my son was walking. He hung around us for a while but only until I was working, going to school and watching the little boy make friends and get bitten by girls in day care and making school projects and tucking himself in. Those were the years Time fudged the numbers. Not fair to us but every thing has it's lesser moments. But we at least we were friends again. I appreciated His prescence in my life and consequently He didn't hound me anymore. He just hung around.

But this scene on the porch was just another moment in another day in another town for another reason. We shook hands again, caught up with each other in that fleeting glimpse and we were refreshed. Time went on with His duties and I stepped back on my stage. I wasn't aware that my perspective had needed cleaning. It did.