TIME

TIME

5:05 AM – a tiny sliver of a matchstick embeds itself in the pad of my right thumb. I am a bit of a pragmatist; I had two choices for quick removal; use the nails of the left hand to remove it or find tweezers to pluck it out. My fingernails were right there. At 5:10, I concluded that I had chosen incorrectly. As I stood to look for tweezers, I spied a small safety pin lying on the end table. “This should do the job” I thought. 5:17 – I had successfully extracted nothing and used twelve minutes of precious writing time. Feeling the pings of frustration, I decided to stop wasting time; write with the splinter lodged in the pad of the thumb. 5:45 AM – discomfort forced me to find the tweezers. Of course, tweezer removal had been compromised. The tiny splinter had become a pain in the proverbial rear end – my thumb.

The question, “What would you write about if you discovered you were terminally ill?” was the writing prompt of the same morning. After a moment of thought, it occurred to me that all my time is terminal. I don’t get to live infinitely. I would imagine, when words like “you have six months to live or nothing more can be done medically,” are spoken, one becomes more acutely aware that their time is not limitless. It never has been, yet we choose to live as if it is.

Back to my right thump, if all time is terminal, had I just spent some of mine sweating over a proverbial small thing? Or did I learn the truth; time is never wasted if one walks away with some form of enlightenment.

Author, Richard Carson, coined the phrase “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it is all small stuff.” This is basically true. There are instances, however, when the small stuff must be dealt with expeditiously to avoid it becoming big stuff. Fix or get rid of it or minimize it and put it into proper perspective – don’t scratch at it, poke at it, rub it. I should have gone for the tweezers. The splinter incident happened in February. I can still feel it when I hold the pen in a certain way.

Sweating small things is a reality that hounds all of humanity (my opinion). Left unattended they can become huge, small things must be addressed – sometimes. Sometimes they are the calling cards for a much larger issue. Don’t ignore them! Don’t become consumed with them either.

I should have finished messing with that splinter by 5:10 AM. Were I to receive a terminal diagnosis, I’d like to believe that I would continue to write about the small seemingly insignificant everyday life things, i.e., a splinter. The topics often seem silly, but its purpose is always to help me, and you squeeze a bit more juice out of our only guaranteed moment – now. I am terminal- self diagnosed. My writing and life will end. I don’t know when. I hope it is years from now.

Digging for the splinter was a luminous moment in time.

James 4:14

PONDER THIS THOUGHT---The brevity of life is a certainty. Live like it.