Beloved, in the midst of life, you are beset with life toppling all over seemingly at once. There is hardly a break for you to settle down for a while to take a good look at what actually is going on, indeed, in your life.

Sometimes you may feel you are shoved along by a snow plow, lifted up in a flurry of life from moment to moment without knowing what is going on really. At the same moment, you still have to sign in without a moment’s breath to get your bearings and take a breath and reconnoiter and lower the volume.

“Hurry, hurry,” says life. “Get this all done. Before you can finish, you will have been assigned more work and hardly a chance to catch up, let alone get ahead.”

The fact is, in the slap-dash of turmoil, you seek peace. Nevertheless, you try to keep a schedule and do not always succeed or even get started.

Who is it, Dear One, who puts you in such a pace you can’t maintain and can’t get out from under?

O, for the life of a pirate on the High Seas.

Remember when summer vacations took a good two and a half months from the end of June through the beginning of September. Back then, a day lasted a day, and a day was long, and summer lasted a summer. Summer was complete before it was over. Seasons lasted a whole season’s worth of joy before they drew to an end. Time was real then and lasted a whole season of joy. Back then, seasons gave you your money’s worth.

In those days, you had an Easter coat in Easter colors. You wore the coat as though it really were for an occasion, and then a fall coat and then a winter coat and leggings and then a winter coat that was wool and not a parka. Coats were seasonal.

Then, summer was scraped knees and bee bites and days that lasted forever.

Now days are short, and you are older. Does anyone know where the time went?

Now the computer asks you like a broken record on the screen: “Tell me what you want to do."

The computer asks me as if I am a person. The computer is most considerate, as if the computer really spoke to me and cared for my well-being. The computer doesn't call me by name.

Who is this caring computer anyway?

Where are my friends who, from a veil of tears, left me without saying a fond good-bye or even a by-your-leave? They left, just like that, along with the summers that once took their time in summer.

Now it is acknowledged that seasons actually used to be horses of a different color. Now seasons may be called climate change. The only things that last now are perhaps grapes on the vine. It seems that apples no longer grow on trees. Apples have little paper seals that you don’t have to lick, and yet the little seals announce apples in place of blossoms.

Now a nickel does not buy you a cup of coffee nor a newspaper. Why are you waxing nostalgic? You might long for the future now more than the past if you knew how.

You do have glimpses of the past; however, nothing is at all like the past that is nowhere to be found anymore if it ever really did exist. Long ago you lost the tunes of yesteryear and no longer cling to them.

You admit it now. God is right. Time does not exist. Time has come to a stand-still. There is no longer a gloaming. There is no longer lying on your back in a meadow chewing on a piece of straw. You don’t recall that you ever did this really, yet you miss it just the same.