On a whim…

On the strange elasticity of years and the tenderness of realizing how swiftly they pass.

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A child sits on the floor, lost among his toys.
His mother says, It’s time to go now. Put them away.

In his imagination he is already moving—
tidying, obeying, swift as thought.
But to her eyes nothing has changed.
Seconds pass. The command comes again, sharper this time.
And when she scolds him for not listening,
he is bewildered.
How could she not see?
He had begun the instant she asked.

A child does not measure time.
He lives inside it like a fish in water,
the current invisible, infinite.
An adult measures it out—seconds, minutes, hours—
a metronome against which patience ticks and love frays.
Between them lies not disobedience,
but two different kinds of existence.

And then, one day, the parent grows older.
The tempo steadies, then slips.
Days become weeks, weeks turn to months.
The seasons collapse into one another
like pages turning too quickly to read.
He watches grandchildren at play
and says the thing the young never believe:
Enjoy this while you can. These days will be gone before you know it.

For this too is a kind of time travel—
to stand in one moment and remember another,
to scold the child you once were,
and to hear yourself answer back
from somewhere deep in the years.

And when at last you understand
how swiftly it all has gone,
you smile—
not for joy exactly,
but for the tenderness of knowing
you were there,
and it was enough.

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Reflection:
We never meant to become travelers in time; it happened while we were looking away. Yet somehow love leaves footprints in both directions, marking where we stood when it still felt like forever.

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