It is amazing how fast time flies. From childhood to adulthood, from middle age to old age, time just keeps moving at a hectic pace.
It really does seem to move faster the older I get. The challenge for me has always been to slow down long enough to appreciate the time I have and the people I get to spend my life with.
Yet, my life has always been a “life in the fast lane”.
I joined the military two months after my seventeenth birthday was married and had a child by the age of twenty-two. We started our companies at age twenty-nine and I have been pushing for more ever since.
Now, as I step back and do an assessment of my life, I am convinced the fast lane is no place to live. In fact, if I could do it over, I would spend my time with those I love as if the time was as limited as I have come to see it is.
A “life in the fast lane” never takes the time to stop and smell the roses as the cliché professes. It just moves by at its frantic pace as if doing or getting the next thing is all that matters.
Oh, how short sighted that mindset is.
You see, our life is going by whether we like it or not. Regardless of the push we use to get ahead or to accomplish the things we feel led to accomplish, we will be made aware soon enough, if we haven’t already, life itself is fleeting.
To have opportunity to relive the moments with my children I chose to miss because I was always pushing to get ahead or to spend time loving my wife the way I should have loved her instead of striving to give her the life I wanted her to have.
These instances are just a fraction of the things I would give up a “life in the fast lane” to have again.
It is interesting how our priorities shift over time. A lot of it has to do with losing people you love or not getting to spend as much time with them as you would have liked.
I say all of this not as a woe is me story or even one to beat myself up. My point is to express the realty our lives are in a lane that is moving faster than we can even imagine. My hope is to help someone see the value in slowing down long enough to enjoy it!
If not, I guarantee you will wish did. Because as the song says, “life in the fast lane can surely make you lose your mind”!
Ecclesiastes 6:12, “For no one knows what is best for a person during his life -- during the few days of his fleeting life -- for they pass away like a shadow. Nor can anyone tell him what the future will hold for him on earth.
