Is There Time?

Ever since the new year started, I’ve been feeling like this is the year of ‘no time’. Like most people living in the 21st century, the feeling of not having enough time is not unfamiliar to me. When I used to work like a dog, and fill up my life with pointless pastimes like shopping and movies and surfing, the feeling of ‘no time’ was often overwhelming to the point of suffocation.

But things have changed a lot in the intervening years, and that’s not what I’m talking about now. Now, thank G-d, I have time for the important things in life, like introspection, and walks, and real conversations with my husband and kids. Yet I woke up the day after Chanuka, feeling half-panicked and in a rush, for no obvious reason. “There is no time!!”

No time for what?

Time to change, maybe? Time to stop making excuses about all the horrible habits and character traits that we all still have, that are destroying the people we love the most, like our spouses and kids.

As there’s no time, can we speak frankly? You and I both know that you, and I, and four billion other people in the world are addicted to the internet. We both know that we feel guilty about the time we waste online, tracking down pointless bits of trivia or uploading ‘look at me’ stuff to Facebook.

We both know that our households are suffering from our internet addiction; that our marriages are cracking; that our kids are falling through the gaps (even though they won’t tell us that themselves, because they are also glued to their Ipads). We both know how hard it is to get away from it (“I need it for work!!”  “I need it to keep up with people!” “I need it to spread emuna!”)

Maybe, if there was all the time in the world, we could just wait for someone to come and invent the next thing that would cure us and our families of being addicted to the internet, and that would restore our humanity and our ability to feel again, and not just to experience life as sensory overload.

But there isn’t.

If there was all the time in the world, maybe we could wait the 25 or so years it’s going to take for us and our kids to hit rock bottom spiritually, have a long overdue midlife crisis, realize what a mess our lives are and start to turn everything around and to come back to G-d.

But there is no time.

Maybe, if there was more time, I could wait the three decades it’s going to take for me to finally realize that all the horrible, poisonous gossip, backstabbing and negative comparisons I engaged in didn’t just disappear into thin air, but did profound, ongoing hurt to the people I spoke about. That’s why they don’t want to talk to me any more. That’s why I’m off their greeting cards list. That’s why they run away from me when they see me coming down the frozen foods aisle in the supermarket.

If we had more time, maybe we’d come to that conclusion ourselves, and then spend another five years working ourselves up to actually do something real to try and fix it. But there is no time.

Maybe, that’s just how I’m feeling this year, and it’s just a stimulus for me, to encourage me to get my skates on and stop dithering about a few things that I’ve been trying to push off until “later”.

But I talk to quite a few other people, and that feeling that things are speeding up, that some massive ‘end’ point is about to occur – whether it’s a financial disaster, another war right here in the Middle East, or terrible social unrest and chaos in the US – seems to be quite prevalent.

The people who are plugged in to their feelings are aware that ‘there is no time’, to a greater or lesser extent, and the people who aren’t have no idea what I’m talking about. But let’s say I’m wrong – after all, I’m not a prophet, I’m not a tzaddik, there are many days when I wonder if I’m even making the cut as a good, simple Jew; maybe I’m wrong, and there is still time?

What then?

Time is our most precious commodity. So many of us waste it on so many inane (at best) or plain evil things, because our evil inclination tells us we have all the time in the world. “Come back to G-d tomorrow, because today there’s a great Knicks game…or a great deal on a 58″ plasma TV…or the best thriller to come out for 40 years…”

And we fall for it. But really? There is no time. There is no time to tell our spouse and kids that we love them. There is no time to own up to and challenge all the ‘bad’ that’s still lurking in our souls. There is no time to be kinder, better, believing people. Even if we start working on it now, it’s still going to take us 120 years to finish the job.

So really? There is no more time.