A Meditation on Time

I am in community with someone who works in hospice care. During a recent conversation, I asked how their workday had gone. It’s a typical question for us, but their answer was anything but. They said, “Most of the people I met with today have lost the ability to use their voice.”

As someone who watched my grandmother journey through the final stages of life in hospice, I knew exactly what that meant. The clock of their lives was speeding up.

Processing the silence, I imagined those strangers existing within was gut-wrenching. I found myself weeping just seconds after the words left my friend’s mouth. The idea of being removed from my words made me feel suddenly guilty for not being more grateful, for not making better use of the health I have and, hopefully, will continue to have. My fear of time wasted has separated me from the goodness of the time that remains.

Lately, with a lot of unscheduled time on my hands, I’ve found myself caught in a useless doom scroll. I scroll through the suffering of the world and my own shortcomings, which have left me stuck, like my feet are set in concrete made of fear. The senseless vulgarity of our collective suffering has also rendered me mostly silent. My words, or maybe even my world, haven’t felt necessary or sufficient for the moment.

But then my friend reminded me of something deeply rooted in truth: time does run out. The numbers will eventually fall off the clock.

So, what more reason do we need to break free from the limiting and foolish fear of tyrants, or from the imaginary boogeymen we create in our own minds? All any of us can do is take life as it comes. And in the only moment we can truly count on—the one we are in right now—we must use it as well as we possibly can.

As my tears dried during our call, my friend left me with a powerful reminder about the weight of each moment, even the final ones:

"Your voice is not just the sounds you make or the words you form. It is also your presence. They are still speaking."

It’s not over until it’s over.

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