Time goes by.\u00a0 Sometimes it flies by.\u00a0 I decided I would grab it as it went past.\u00a0 I mean a minute of it. \u00a04:48 PM Sunday, January 24, 2021 to be exact.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean stopping time.\u00a0 It\u2019s silly to imagine I could do that.\u00a0 But I wanted to take a moment and put it in my mind.\u00a0 Like pickling it in a jar so it would keep for a while.\u00a0 Writing this is sealing the jar.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s say you are blessed to live to be 80.\u00a0 It\u2019s an impossible number to comprehend, but that\u2019s around 42 million minutes above the ground.\u00a0 Most of those minutes are forgotten immediately after their passing.\u00a0 Some, a relative few, are saved in our personal mental museum.\u00a0 The museum is otherwise known as our memory.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m soon to be 65.\u00a0 That\u2019s come to be an important birthday.\u00a0 Medicare, Social Security, retirement: all happen around then, give or take. \u00a0Friends and I talk about how time goes by faster as you get older.\u00a0 That isn\u2019t strictly true, and it doesn\u2019t make sense.\u00a0 But we all agree.\u00a0 Time goes by faster as you get older.<\/p>\n
All the more reason to grab a moment.\u00a0 The particular 4:48 that I picked, I was walking the long driveway by the Schoenstatt Shrine west of Sleepy Eye.\u00a0 That place is a gem, a favorite place.\u00a0 Today, I wasn\u2019t going to pray in the beautiful chapel.\u00a0 Rather, I was interested in the bare driveway.<\/p>\n
It had snowed, and I was looking for a clear place to walk.\u00a0 I\u2019ve begun walking after my Achilles tendon surgery.\u00a0 At 4:48, I was about halfway out the driveway.\u00a0 It was 12 degrees, but pleasant enough, almost calm, with a setting sun gamely trying to warm things before falling below the horizon.<\/p>\n
My immediate task was putting one foot ahead of the other while watching for icy patches.\u00a0 Walking is not taken for granted after a month being on one foot.\u00a0 In the minute I was claiming for posterity, my head was filled with the usual clutter.\u00a0 I was thinking of chores I needed to do, people in my life, and events of the world.<\/p>\n
I am a speck in Creation, so my thoughts went out.\u00a0 How were others spending this moment that I plucked out of eternity? \u00a0I had a fairly good idea Pam was watching the show she was watching when I left the house.\u00a0 Our three kids are in places east, west, and south of me.\u00a0 Knowing something of their lives, I could make a ballpark guess as to what they were doing.\u00a0 Same for my sister and brother.<\/p>\n
Once I got to nephews and nieces and cousins, it was more a scattershot guess as to what they were doing at that exact moment.\u00a0 I thought of two newborns, Pam\u2019s grandniece and my great grandniece.\u00a0 Willa and Raelynn are a few weeks old.\u00a0 They won\u2019t remember this moment or any other for a while.\u00a0 But their little minds are gushing forth with new cells and synapses.\u00a0 That\u2019s exciting, as I cling to the ones I have left.<\/p>\n
There was a football game on; I figured some friends were watching that.\u00a0 If not for the virus, I might have been watching with some of them.\u00a0 Off to my left was Sleepy Eye.\u00a0 I could see a handful of houses, some other buildings, the empty Del Monte plant prominent among them, and trees.\u00a0 In my view if not exact eyesight, there were Sleepy Eye\u2019s 3,401 people, plus some on farm sites as I looked around.<\/p>\n
Given the time of day, I assume some were preparing food, some watching TV, some reading, maybe cleaning up.\u00a0 Kids were playing.\u00a0 In a rural town like mine, there are a lot of elderly, some of them maybe napping before supper.\u00a0 Being a Sunday, not a lot were working.\u00a0 A few were at places that were open: grocery store, convenience stores, the couple bars.\u00a0 There were probably more people home then than at 4:48, January 24, 2020.\u00a0 A year ago, we were just becoming aware of the virus that would alter our lives.<\/p>\n
Of course, it was only 4:48 PM in this time zone.\u00a0 I thought of friends on the East coast where it was 5:48, close to dinner time, maybe happy hour.\u00a0 I thought of a friend in Arizona, 3:48, probably on the golf course.<\/p>\n
It was this time of day in this longitude, going back to my junior high geography.\u00a0 I saw from fooling around with the clock on my phone that it was 4:48 in Mexico City, although the sun was higher there closer to the equator.\u00a0 We share a time zone with people in Canada, Mexico, and down into Central America.\u00a0 Otherwise, it\u2019s the Arctic to the north and Pacific Ocean to the south.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 7.6 billion of us humans living right now, so a rough guess might be a couple hundred million were living my moment at 4:48.\u00a0 Other places, people were early in their day, some in the middle of their night.\u00a0 Light to the west, dark to the east.\u00a0 In the words of the song writer John Prine, \u201cThat\u2019s the way that the world goes round.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I tried to think about sharing this moment with all those fellow travelers on this planet it was a bit boggling.\u00a0 Who knows what we were all doing right then around the globe?\u00a0 A lot of mundane things no doubt.\u00a0 A few billion probably sleeping.\u00a0 A few billion working in factories, fields, roads, hospitals.<\/p>\n
If I could see far enough and through the planet below my feet, there were likely loving and kind things going on.\u00a0 And I suppose some bad things.\u00a0 There are multiple armed conflicts around the globe, so it was possible right then, somebody somewhere was trying to kill someone.<\/p>\n
A mischievous thought entered my mind.\u00a0 I wondered right then how many people were, well, you know.\u00a0 Those 7.6 billion people had to come from somewhere.<\/p>\n
Then, just like that, it was 4:49.\u00a0 My minute was past.\u00a0 On to a new one, one I would soon forget.\u00a0 My pickled and jarred minute will probably fade, too.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll read this in ten years, and it will come back.<\/p>\n
Thirty minutes later, it was 5:18, the sun had set, and I\u2019d turned into the breeze.\u00a0 I was cold and didn\u2019t really want to save that minute.<\/p>\n
Here at soon-65, I\u2019m as aware as ever that each of these moments is a gift: the forgettable ones and the few remembered.\u00a0 Feel free to grab one of your own.\u00a0 They\u2019re going by fast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Time goes by.\u00a0 Sometimes it flies by.\u00a0 I decided I would grab it as it went past.\u00a0 I mean a minute of it. \u00a04:48 PM Sunday, January 24, 2021 to be exact. I don\u2019t mean stopping time.\u00a0 It\u2019s silly to imagine I could do that.\u00a0 But I wanted to take a moment and put it …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 08:49:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122070,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121974\/revisions\/122070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}