It’s Monday afternoon and I just realized that I have been thinking a lot about time…time passing, what time we have, time during the day, set aside time, how to use time….

This weekend was full of time to catch up with rest and with people.  On Saturday, Ana and I took our time in the morning doing things that restore ourselves. For me this is spending time in the morning in prayer, writing, playing with writing ideas and checking in with my friends here and there. For Ana, this includes sleeping without a need to get up at a certain time and eventually wandering out to sip on coffee and waking up slowly in the morning.  We then wandered together out to breakfast in the neighborhood which restores us both. We love to sit at the canal and eat a lovely brunch and spending time together just being in that space.  It was a lovely late summer morning with sun and coolness still.

Saturday afternoon we wandered with our pups to the park that is called Templehofer Feld. I have mentioned this place before but it was an airport, now a huge community park with dog parks, community garden, beer garden, runways to walk along, etc.  Our dogs love the dog park and take great delight in chasing after each other in the fenced field. We wandered home after we were all panting and sweaty from the late summer sun.  I made dinner and we then spent time each of us doing things that allowed us to just be…I read and watched shows on my computer while Ana played her video game.

Time was precious but not stingy and well spent.

Yesterday I got up and went to church…where time seemed to stand still a bit but I was grateful for the time with people in worship.  And then I came home to hang with Ana for a minute before I met up with two of my becoming closest friends here in Berlin who both happen to be from the US as well.  We decided to meet at 3pm without agenda and timeline except to catch up and just hang out and talk.

And all of a sudden time opened up.  We spent hours talking about each life and what we were up to and what we were dealing with and sharing deeply.  We made food together and drank coffee and then water and then wine until many hours later we went our separate ways and it was a luxury to have that kind of time with people and I find myself as I enter into my late thirties that this kind of time is the time I truly value.

In the middle of that time I took a pause to facetime with my nieces which I do every weekend…the nephews get a mid week facetime check in…and this time talking with them, I wouldn’t exchange for the world. At the end of our check in my eldest niece said, “Aunt Courtney, at Christmas time will I get to hug you for real?”  She air hugs me over facetime and almost with tears I assured her that at Christmas time she would get to hug me for real as much as she could possibly handle and then some…for real for real.  Time is passing too quickly for those moments and it makes me think about the time that I am spending away from them and yet not regretting this time here at all either. I just don’t want to miss much more time.  She and I talked about how today she enters the Pre-K classroom and will practice for Kindergarten…ohhhh time, slow down.

This morning I woke up just in time to get ready for German class which sometimes makes time slow down or speed up depending on the German coming in my brain.  And as I opened up Facebook I saw a pic of my group of people in Portland who went to a concert last night and it is a wonderful pic but then it made me miss them soooo much and I realized in that moment that time continues on and when I return I will hop back into that picture but time will happen and pass and there is nothing I can do to make it stand still.

And today as I sit in my favorite little cafe in our neighborhood and wait for the muse to hit a bit I realize again that to be creative means carving out time. It doesn’t just come on demand. It must be prepared and time must be cleared and I am not always so good at that because I like to fill time and don’t want to miss any time or any event.  But in order to honor this space and leave and projects yearning to get out… I must honor them with time.

Isn’t time a fickle thing?