Precious little time

Sunday morning I was not at my best.  The day started off fine but then, just as we were walking out the door to catch CalTrain, my younger son "Boy #2" decided that he needed one of his Lego guys to accompany him throughout the day.

And this particular Lego guy was nowhere to be found.  The Lego guys strewn across the kitchen table were his brother’s, the guys on the Lego table (a re-purposed train table) weren’t the right ones, and neither were any of the guys on display on Boy #2′s shelf in his room.

CalTrain waits for nothing, not even for calamities such as this.

And, despite the fact that I knew that we had enough time, my encouragement turned to frustration and then to all out yelling, “We’re going to miss the train!”  Frantic now and crying (my guilt for this swallowed me whole later), Boy #2 grabbed a few Lego Ninjago cards and we raced out the door, drove to the train station, bought tickets, paid for parking, and then had a full eight minutes to wait for the train.  My husband wisely said nothing when the kids looked down the tracks and asked, “When is the train coming?”

This is what my life is like: hurry, hurry, hurry and wait.  I hate to be late and it’s making everyone in my family miserable.

Obsessive timeliness does have it’s benefits – great seats at the movie theater, for one, and the boys have only had to get tardy slips from the school office once (Bill was driving them that day).

But my constant push to be somewhere takes away the enjoyment of getting somewhere.

“Don’t let the urgent crowd out the important,” Mary Pipher

Hurrying will be a big habit for me to break.  I haven’t figured out how to no longer festinate, but I know that by rushing I’m teaching my kids the wrong lessons – that timeliness is more important than happiness; that what’s ahead is more important than what’s right here, right now.  Too soon, my boys will be grown and on their way to being adults.  Our children learn from how we live our lives, and we have such precious little time to teach them what we know in our hearts to be true.

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