Wrinkles in Time

Coach Amy and her youngest child, Nina.

You can’t slow it down, speed it up, rewind or fast forward it. There is no catching it. It keeps on marching forward with or without us and completely irrespective of our perception of it. IT is time, and there are wrinkles in it, incontrovertible folds in the fabric of time that seemingly defy reality.

There are times when sixty seconds is eternal like when my lungs are on fire whilst sprinting quarter mile repeats on the track. Yet when I’m hanging onto the edge of the pool gasping for breath after a 200 meter hard lap, the sixty seconds of “rest” my coach prescribed is fleeting. This discrepancy is a Pain Wrinkle.

There is that time last year when when I ran the Boston Marathon…oh wait, that was ten years ago, according to Facebook. Thankfully I have a whole collection of social media pictures that mark that Age Wrinkle or I might not believe that many years, weeks, days and hours actually passed.

What about the Trauma Wrinkle of the pandemic, when time stood still? A whole year on pause. It is only now that we are starting to come out of it that I feel the relative slack in the rope snapping dangerously tight, dragging me and the rest of society like a fallen water skier behind the boat, face first.

Then there are the Bittersweet Wrinkles. During a long training run, a dear friend of mine was marveling how her son was turning six and how fast that year “flew by”. This triggered a sudden onslaught of visions of my youngest child, a slideshow on steroids depicting her life from birth to her looming high school graduation. My throat tightened, my stomach cramped and my eyes burned; we stopped running because it is really hard to run while sobbing into a pair of mittens.

A Death Wrinkle is the incomprehensible fact that life continues, the planet keeps turning and time keeps marching on when a loved one is gone. Shouldn’t it come to a screeching halt? How dare it move forward!

There are vast wrinkles in time. Some are universal and others are quite personal. My hope is that by recognizing them and embracing them, I can smooth them out a little bit, even if it is just for a second…