I stooped on a beach walk over the turn of this year and stared at the recording of quiet moments in the medium of dirty sand. Gentle. Individual. Easing in and then easing back out from each successive wave. Directed by the moon unseen, while the orb we walk on circles the sun. No one notices. The evidence of each passing wave is left in the tiny remnants. No gallery can hang this, but no price would be high enough to understand such beauty. It is observing the whole, many seemingly random passings marking such pattern that is so moving to me.

Isabel Allende writes in her novel about her dying daughter, “Time moves so slowly. Or perhaps it doesn’t move at all and it is we who pass through it.”

“You don’t have time, Len”, pens Ellen Brashares, in Sisterhood Everlasting. “That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want.”

That resonates with me also. Time is simply a metering out. It is our opportunity to see the pattern. Time is a finite tester of who we really are and what it is we each really want.

Time is a gift, and you are passing through.