Haiku

Life moves fast. I find it quite difficult to manage, in fact. One may remember hearing from a parent, grandparent that the speed of life could be compared to blinking. You will find yourself looking back at life and everything that has happened will be as the blink of an eye. I don’t know if I believe this. I blink everyday. So do you. You should disagree with this too! I’ve heard that the average human blink 20,000 times a day! If this is true, then we should be living 20,000 lives… per DAY! I simply think this is an unjust comparison to the speed of life. Something more like a long road trip would befit the analogy. If you’ve been on a road trip, you know that the journey ahead is long, but once you arrive, the memory of the trip was short.

I remember hearing a speaker talk about the human experience with time. His suggestion to the us was that our interaction with time changes with age. To explain the phenomenon of the experience that a year at age 5 is much longer than it is at 10, which is longer than it is at 20, which is longer than it is at 40, which is longer than it is at 80 years of age, he told us that our concept of time has a direct relation to how much of it we have experienced. You must remember summer vacation from school at an early age. It was an epic experience!

Think about the movie The Sandlot and the entirety of the experience they boys went through. Didn’t it feel like the journey represented a long lasting age of time? It represents every summer of my childhood with every dramatic up and down, the fear of the old lady next door, long days of baseball in the tee-ball field.

Long summer days brings long summers.

By the time school was back in session, you were ready, because you had an adventure and now it was time to go play with the kids at school. At age 8, three months of summer vacation is over 2.5% of their life. It may not seem like a lot but if you compare it to a 16-year-old  and the same three-month summer break, its only 1.25% of their life. At age 32, a three-month span of time (unless you’re a teacher, you don’t have summer break anymore) it consists of about .65% of their life span. That same experience of an eight year old summer break that is three months long, for the 32-year-old only feels like 3 weeks!  The percentage of life experience to compared the time to is much greater for the 32-year-old than it is for the 8-year-old. (I butchered the explanation. I’m sorry. If you’re confused then bring it up in the comments and I’ll try to explain it.)

What’s the point?

Someone recently challenged me to write down what I want on my gravestone…

What will I be remembered for?

Donald Miller speaks of our need to remain responsible for the areas within our influence, in his blog yesterday. “If you have a family…” he says

“… your family comes first.” He’s right, of course. Your first responsibility must always remain to the one whose life is directly effected by your hands. I, being a husband and father of two must remain on my farm. My boys are my crop and I must tend to them if I want them to grow up well. My wife is my helper and in order for us to work together, I must remain unified with her.

I want to be remembered as someone who cared for his family. My body is selfish and therefore I do not want to give my time and effort towards that cause, but I must for the sake of love, sacrifice myself and be the husband and father that I need to be.

In the reflection of how I would like to be remembered, I wrote a haiku. This is what I would hope to have on my gravestone.

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Reflected Christ

Loving Father, Husband

Followed His Dreams

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It is really deep… I know! Of course, I do not think this is me, but it is an incredible goal. If we give ourselves a target, then we are able to aim at something. If our life has but one purpose, every decision becomes focused on completing that goal.

Give yourself a chance today to tinker with what you are going to be remembered for and then tomorrow, start doing it.