Time Wounds All Heals

Michelangelo - Sistine Chapel

He said: 

I don't question God's existence. It seems like a waste of time. I don't pretend to be "spiritual". I try to be "good". Loose change goes to the homeless I pass on the street. I don't steal, lie or cheat. I don't know about heaven or hell, but I believe in doing unto others etc. My big vice is anger. Maybe pride. No definitely anger. I want to rip his head off every time he contradicts me in a meeting. I want those people out of my fucking way on crowded sidewalks. On planes and other forms of public transport, I want her to gag that crying baby, now. No, I dont feel sympathy when its not my problem, but if you're a victim of a hit and run I will intervene and try and save your life.

She said: 

Apparently, for me to begin to get a body like Jennifer Aniston's, I would need to work out for like half an hour, five times a day, for three months before I even start to see results. 

Ok, first of all, who has that kind of time? And second, what takes three months these days anyway? I can get a pizza delivered in an hour, I can get to Australia in less than 24, and didn't it only take God seven days to create the whole world including a day of rest? 

So three months strikes me as a hell of a long time to wait. Which got me thinking about time and how our perception of it has dramatically altered in the last decade. I don't garden, so I don't often (read, never) get to plant seeds and watch them slowly grow. The virtue of patience seems on its way to extinction and the word may even disappear (along with the dictionary). 

As we disconnect from reality, we won't ever have to wait for anything at all.

Take the internet. I can feel myself ready to bash the screen in if I have to wait more than two seconds for a page to load. I don't just want it all, I want it five minutes ago. And I would certainly rather give up my fitness pursuit than waste three months hoping to see a muscle somewhere. 

And I convince myself that life is too short to wait that long. But as I skip frantically from place to another and pack my schedule so tightly I barely have time to write this, I just feel so irritable all the time. Even sitting still makes me uncomfortable never mind a spot of Downward Facing Dog. 

But then I think of the beautiful things. That I lay in the park on a hot afternoon and managed to fall asleep during the day for the very first time since I was five. That wine tastes so good when you leave it to breathe. And spending hours reading the Sunday paper is so much more satisfying than clicking through Google news. 

It took Michelangelo four years to paint 12,000 square feet of the Sistine chapel ceiling. He probably slept there, woke up with the sun and got to work, taking hours and hours to perfect just one little splash of paint.

Good things can be spontaneous, great things are deliberate and made up of thousands of pieces of time. 

And I guess there's a reason why Jennifer Aniston is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood, and I'm at home waiting for my $20 pizza...