“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
~ Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Our 2023 goal was to post a new JnK Davis article at least once a month. Having no sooner set that goal, our life went into an article-posting tailspin, and we’ve been on that ride ever since. This dearth of posted articles, we said, demonstrates that we are fully engaged in projects that appear more important than sharing our life with our friends and family. And, while we have made all sorts of satisfying improvements to the site over the past year, they are akin to cleaning house or washing the laundry—if no one notices the absence of filth or dirt, then, mission accomplished!
This is it then. It has arrived. The day to write a new article! So, we sat down to write. We tried writing standing up, but, that didn’t work out too well. So back to sitting. But we digress. As we entered Tennessee William’s quote, our daughter called. Suddenly, we were faced with a familiar dilemma: What is more important now? In this moment? Writing the article to encourage our family and friends (and ending this ridiculous months-long article hiatus—this article-hating binge of anti-blogging madness!!), or talking with our daughter? Of course we chose to visit with our daughter. Because one, she’s awesome! And two, her call represented clearly the power of relationship. In the midst of drowning in a deluge of plans, projects, and “time is of the essence” commitments, our daughter took a moment out of her equally overextended schedule to encourage and inspire us in the way that only she can. That beautiful moment of thoughtfulness on her part laid the foundation for this article. Perfect timing daughter!
In the latter part of 2023, we put our life on pause to move in with our grandmother, in honor of her request to pass in her own home—which she did. And, while we waited for the state to appoint James as “executor” of her estate, our Mother Vi’s twin sister, Violet, passed suddenly. So, in a single month, we were charged with settling two estates, in two different states, simultaneously, which, to say the least, was very unsettling to our way of life. It has now been almost 7 months of daily attention to the closing down of the busy-ness of two very active lives. What we have learned from this encounter is a) Probate is like being in the wild wild west with a slingshot—Get a Trust!; and b) Life is a series of sprints within a long distance race—but viewed from 100,000 feet, just one BIG DASH.
The dash was not lost on Aunt Violet, who lived almost 85 years. Amongst her precious keepsakes was a simple quote written on a plain white piece of paper: Your headstone will list your birthdate – death date. Life is comprised of the dash in between. Live your best dash.
If time is the longest distance between two places, the dash represents the manner in which we arrive at our destination. So back to our goal! What was it again? Oh yes … to write at least one new blog article per month—to share pieces of our life with friends and family not tomorrow, but now. Time is of the essence!
Search the phrase “time is of the essence” on Google—ok, don’t really because (ta-da!) we’ve saved you the time! The result is about 184,000,000 results computed in 0.47 seconds (oh the irony). The AI generated content at the top of the search read, “In a legal context, “time is of the essence” is a statement that may be included in the language of the provisions of a contract to emphasize that the parties must complete their obligations on time.”
But of course, we humans—especially we American humans—know better. “Time is of the essence” is no legal mumbo jumbo abracadabra. It’s a statement of “you’ve got to do this thing and do it now, because there’s no other choice—it’s now or never time.” Said much more concisely: “Stat!” (as say the surgeons).
Most of our regular readers are too busy to read our articles, but they make the time anyway—God bless ‘em. Time is of course not made by us, but certainly spent by us, managed by us, or mismanaged by us. And yet, in another sense, time is made from taking time from somewhere else. We must give up time to get time. It’s a zero sum game, time. We are grateful and humbled for the time others have made (and continue to make) for us. In the long distance dash that is our lives, a shared dash is the only dash we feel worth the distance.