My Own Time

One of my daughters “graduated” from eight grade this year. It’s considered a graduation because she’ll be starting high school in the fall. This was the third time we’ve had a daughter go through these graduation proceedings. It’s held in the gym at the first part of June—a gym that is like five-hundred years old with air conditioning that is about as effective as thinking cool thoughts.

Each year, the chorus sings. And each year, they sing the same song—one that drives me nuts. It’s called “Seasons of Love” from a musical called Rent. The opening lyric starts out as, “Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.” (I guess that’s appropriate because that’s how long the graduation ceremony seems to last.)

That number, 525, 600, is the number of minutes in a year. Well, a standard year, not a leap year. Hmmm. Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe during a leap year, they won’t sing that song. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course they will.

Anyway, it’s a cliché that everyone is given the same amount of time each day, or each year. How we choose to spend it is up to us. Kind of.

Let me elaborate.

Last year, I was able to help our church with supplying food for those in need. It’s actually a really neat program. For those in the LDS faith, there are food warehouses filled with various types of food. If a family is in need—health issues, job loss, things like that—they can get food from the church twice a month.

It’s a little more involved than that, and needs some clarification to make my point. In order for someone to get food, it needs to be approved by the congregational leader (known as a Bishop) and the leader of the woman’s organization (called the Relief Society President). The Relief Society President works with the family to find their needs and then orders the food ahead of time.

When the food arrives at the church twice a month, the people from the warehouse only bring what has been ordered for the various families. There aren’t any extras.

One time I was helping a lady pick up her order. She was one of the first people to come in that morning. I had a sheet of what had been ordered for her. As we filled her order, she kept saying things like, “I want two of these instead of one” or “My kids really like those. Give me a few more.”

I kindly, as I could, told her we could only give her what was on the order sheet. If she needed more for her next order, the time to decide that was when she next met with her Relief Society President.

At one point, she became frustrated with me and said, “I don’t understand why I can’t have more. There is plenty here.”

I stopped, looked directly into her eyes, and as nicely as I could explained, “There isn’t any extra. They only deliver what is on the order sheets. If I give you extra, then I’m taking away from someone else who ordered it, and therefore needs it.”

It took her a moment to process this concept. Here she was, surrounded by food, yet she struggled with the idea that she couldn’t take all she wanted; the rest of it belonged to someone else.

What does this have to do with the “time” story earlier in the blog? It’s this: I have had to attend a lot of meetings for various reasons during my life. Each of them usually has a start and end time. Sometimes the person in charge of the meeting decides they are going to use more time than scheduled—to them, it’s important, and there is plenty of time left in the day.

But, you see, that time doesn’t belong to them. Sometimes the meetings are back-to-back. So if one presenter goes long, they are taking time away from the next presenter, a presenter who was told they were given a certain amount of time, but now won’t have it because someone else took it.