Following stress reactions (early stress fractures) in both shins, I'm on the long road toward building back up to my previous strength and endurance. This morning I took a 2-mile half-jog-half-walk (run 1/8 mile, walk 1/8 mile) in my neighborhood and the local elementary school's track and vita course, and toward the end I stopped to do some back extensions on the parallel bars. Face-down to the mulch, I spotted a little shred of paper that turned out to be a fragment from a fortune cookie.
At first, I was bummed that it was incomplete, but then I realized that I knew what the fortune was. I had received it in a cookie years ago, and saved it, and later created a notecard with it, and I still haven't found the right occasion to use the card.
Thinking about this phrase eventually led me to the middle stanza of John Byrne Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley's poem Fortune's Wheel:
| A little while did Fortune smile |
| On him and her and me: |
| We sang along the road of life |
| Like birds upon a tree. |
(The first and third stanzas are about lost love, but those are unimportant to these musings.)
Motherhood - and life in general - have been frustrating lately. There are so many things that must be done or that I want to do, and so many distractions, and also so much about the developmental stages my kids are in that bogs us down and prevents me from doing all the other things I must do or want to do. The youngest is very clingy and whiny right now. The middle son is absentminded and needs to have somebody make direct eye contact and keep him on task. The oldest is preteen and moody and both pushing away from his parents and desperately in need of them.
But this, too, shall pass. The frustrating stuff, and also the good stuff that hides under it. I might not have time for everything, but there are things more precious than my time, and first among those is the truth of who we all are right in this moment. The wants and needs are never going to go away, so I need to set aside time every day in which I tell all the wants and needs to bite me, and just focus on the truth of the hour and the people in front of me.
What are the precious truths confronting you right now? How do you interpret "truth is more precious than time"?
