Time stands still, yet it races in a blur. How does it do this?

Start live. Hi, welcome to a new year. It's January 2026. Unbelievable. Hi, my name is Kathy and I talk a lot on the live stream in the Cadre about harbor pilots and things having to do with being in the harbor and how they reflect symbols of life today. I want to talk about time, though, and how it can be a burden and it can also be a gift. We think a lot about time as we wring out the old and bring in the new, and I thought today might be a good time to consider the concept of time. I'm not a real cerebral person.

Speaking of time, my cuckoo clock is marking the time. It is 11 o' clock Eastern. I live in Erie, Pennsylvania where we just got socked with a winter storm and we had something called thundersnow last night. But I digress. Since I mentioned it, have you heard of thundersnow? It's so cool. It's a thunderstorm that because of atmospheric conditions being just right and living beside a lake in the crash of water with snow, sometimes produces a thunderstorm during the blizzard. Very cool. Lightning, thunder.

The whole bit lasted maybe less than 10 minutes, but it was a phenomenon and I got to watch it outside my window from my cozy apartment here on the lake shore of Erie, Pennsylvania. So back to this topic of time. Oh, another bunny trail to go down. First, I wanted to mention Brittany Hagan's Live from Yesterday. Brittany did this really thoughtful, gentle dive into what it means to struggle and suffer and how it renders us who we are. Now I invite you to go back to Yesterday New Year's Eve livestream from Brittany Hagan and do the replay.

I'm definitely going back and replaying even though I got to watch the live. In it, Brittany talks about honoring the dark places that have caused how to and time can be a conundrum. I love being a caregiver. I say that loosely. I'm not a hands on caregiver, although I was for a while when she was in her home. Now I'm her POA and I'm her go to person for appointments and legal stuff and money stuff. And I call myself an emotional caregiver because I am supportive to her emotionally as she navigates her days.

Yeah, and that's heavy lifting some days. It's joyful most days. And she's terribly funny and I'm convinced her sense of humor has carried the day many times and I love that. That is very much part of her personality. Still, I have done fun things with the time. I'm not cerebral in any way Not a phys physicist. I don't understand quantum passage of time. I don't know where the past dwells and I don't know when the future begins. That's for the scientific minds out there and go for it. If you have that kind of magical brain.

I have a poetic one. So I like to think of time in whimsical ways. For instance, one of my children lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I sent her a text that said, I just blew you a kiss. I sent her a picture of me blowing a kiss and I said it had to go through two time zones. I wonder what happens to that kiss when it goes through the zone and when it will arrive a little bit later. I got a whimsical answer. She said, 7 to 10 business days and had a little wink emoji. It's interesting to play with time and try to understand it.

Will we ever fathom time? Not this girl. I don't think so. Time is so weird. It stands still. Time flies. We spend time, we waste time, we lose time. We make time. Some of us do time, but I won't go there. Time flies over us, but it leaves its shadow behind. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Should I read it again? Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind. If I were a school teacher and asking my students to write an essay, I would ask them to flesh that out. What does it mean when time leaves its shadow behind?

That's so cool to think about. Time leaves memories, it leaves thoughts, it leaves emotions, it leaves longing. It leaves many things in its shadow. This is mine. I wrote, time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. I'm going to get back to that one. And I was also thinking about how time unfolds. Allow time to unfurl, to reveal its many folds, like a beautiful patchwork quilt. Allow it to pass on its own terms. When we allow time to pass, as it will, on its own terms, it reveals answers to questions.

And it helps us to see, stitched in truth, things we might have missed in our haste to race with time. We lose money, but it can be replaced. You get a job, you take a loan, you call your brother, you do something, you can replace money. We lose knowledge, but we can retrieve it by studying, by reading, by researching, by having conversations with people who are smarter than us. We can retrieve knowledge. We can lose our health, but we can take it back by mindful living, maybe pivoting our daily habits and lifestyle.

Get the treatment schedule, the surgery. We can retrieve health to some degree, but lost time is gone forever. And Albert Einstein of course, I would quote Albert. The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once. There's your cerebral person, because that's mind blowing. We have to have time so that things don't happen all at once. We have to have a human way of calculating the way things unfold so we have time naturally. My being a bender of words, you know, my nickname is Speak Wonder and it's my Cadre handle.

And I love to write haiku. I enjoy writing poetry. Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets, the late Mary Oliver. And from her book A Thousand Mornings is this pitsy little poem Invitation oh, do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy and very important day for the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles for a musical battle to see who can sing the highest note or the lowest or the most expressive of mirth or the most tender. Their strong blunt beaks drink the air as they strive melodiously not for your sake and not for mine, and not for the sake of winning, but for sheer delight and gratitude.

Believe us, they say it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world. I beg of you, do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance. It could mean something. It could mean everything. It could be what Rilke meant when he wrote, you must change your life. Mary Oliver and the poem Invitation. I have this new holder for my phone and it's obscuring the comments. Hello, Mel Myers. Happy New Year to you too. Thanks for being with me on my live stream.

I would like to conclude today by saying the things that we already know, but I'll repeat them in this new year as we pull the curtain on 2026. My word for this year is wonder, because I wonder what it will bring. I want to have a sense of anticipation for what will be revealed in the New year. Time is short. Life is precious. Guard your time. Enjoy your time. Curate your time. And by curate. What I'm getting at is collect the special, obscure and important moments. Write them in a journal if you like to journal.

Store them here. Store them in your heart. Curate the time. Take the best bits of 2025 into the new year with you and reflect on them. And sometimes, yes, waste your time. It sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense to me. Not sure if I can describe it the way it needs to be described, but when we're being productive, we always think of it as being active, forward, thinking forward, moving, scheduling, you know, making the calls, attending the appointments. We do have to to some degree adult and do the things and do the hard things and meet the schedule and be considerate of other people's time.

Sometimes it's okay to waste it. We can be productive in different ways. I mean, seriously, isn't it fun to just sit with your cup of coffee or tea or hot cocoa and just ruminate, stare into the middle distance? We think we have to grab a book or look at our appointments or call a friend. Time sometimes sits at your shoulder, gently taps it and says, Just be. Just breathe. Don't measure the moments, experience them. That's my invitation to you today. I also invite you later to join Ms. Shannon Paul.

Comedy through the chaos. Always a treat with Shannon's humor and good grace. Go and be human today. You are enough. I'm glad to meet your acquaintance every time we gather on the Cadre. And I'll see you next Thursday as we continue experiencing time in the early parts of January 2020.