Reflection This Week
HOW LONG IS A MINUTE?

How long is a minute? Silly question, is it not? Or is it? The correct answer, the only answer, is that a minute is sixty seconds. Yet that almost begs the question. The truth is that a minute, sixty seconds, is always relative, always based on the moment at hand when time is the issue.

     When we are in a hurry, for whatever reason notwithstanding, a minute can seem like a long time. Most stoplights are less than a minute in duration, very few longer than sixty seconds. Yet we have all experienced that anxiety that wells up from within when we want or need to go wherever it is we are going and that light seems as if it will never, ever change.

     Even when I am not in a hurry, Sunday morning at 6:00, on the way to church: no one is on the road and the red light at C and Collins decides that it will wait the full minute to cycle to green. Drives me crazy. Why? What’s the hurry? On the other hand, several years ago I had to have a scan on my knee and I was placed in this machine that made foreboding sounds. I was immobilized. Because I have a good case of claustrophobia, every minute seemed like an hour and the whole ordeal seemed like a lifetime. It was twenty minutes by the clock.

     During Lent this year we are taking some moments of silence after each of the readings so that we can spend a few moments in personal reflection on what we just heard. The silence lasts about fifteen seconds, thirty max. To many of us it seems like an hour. We are simply not used to dealing with silence in the Service or perhaps silence at any time or anywhere.

     There are lots of sounds in the silence, if we would only listen. I look around and it seems as if everyone has a cell phone or an I Pod plugged to his or her ear. Car radios blare so loud that the sound is almost deafening. The television is forever on or there is music in the background. Silence comes only in the still of the night, it seems.

     No matter how anxious we are, we cannot hurry time. The light will change when the light is supposed to change. Our present anxiousness is not a factor. When time is given to us – or perhaps forced upon us – our best bet is to use it well, whether sitting at a red light, sitting in church or sitting by ourselves.

     What we will discover whenever we use well the time given, imposed or taken, is that we hear what we would never have heard had we simply become anxious or annoyed. What we also learn in the process is that when we use that time well, especially those silent times, time flies.

     Time stands still and time flies, and all at the same time. A minute is a minute, sixty seconds, no more and no less. We know that, of course. Yet knowing is not enough. It is what we do with that minute – and all the minutes of our life – that is important. How long is a minute? It depends. It depends on us.     WJP