How do you feel about time? Is it your enemy, or your ally? No matter your perspective on it, it does keep marching on regardless.

Moments – We just had Veterans Day, thanking the men and women who have served, many of them in combat being shot at – where moments count. Moments are also all it takes to bring a child to tears, when they’ve been bonked in the head with an adult wayward elbow – oops, they seem to have grown again!

Minutes – when your baby is born, those first few minutes are magical.

Hours – when you’re in labor for hours or days, or trapped in the rubble of an earthquake or in the aftermath of an avalanche waiting for a rescue, hours are too long.

Days – 47 of them, to be exact, left for funding your 403b/401k yet in 2020. 152 to get your 2020 IRA funded.

Weeks – The amount of time between the popular vote and the electoral vote for US President.

Months – COVID has only been a part of the American landscape for 8 months, and we knew going in that this was likely at best a 12-18 month haul for vaccine development and distribution, if we pulled out all the stops on parallel processing (which risks higher monetary costs) instead of doing the steps in series. Yet we’ve already worn ourselves out emotionally over the demands of protecting ourselves and our communities.

A year – The time your baby is an infant. In 365 days they’ve learned to nurse, hold their head up, smile, laugh, sit up, crawl, play peekaboo, experiment with gravity like a scientist (dropping everything on the ground from their high chair), began to talk, and may have learned to walk.

2 years – how long it takes to wait between oppositions for Earth and Mars. Therefore we had launches for Mars exploration in 2020, but won’t have the next ones until 2022 and 2024.

2-3 years – the typical time investment required to get a new small business to profitability

4 years – how long our Greatest Generation spent fighting in World War II. The war may have been fought on foreign soil, but there was plenty of impact for those still at home as well.

5 years – How long Auschwitz was open.

6 years – the duration of World War II

10 years – the popular opinion number on how long it takes to become an expert at something. And 10x year 1 doesn’t count 😉

18 years – is how long you have with your child under your roof. 940 Saturdays. By the time they graduate from high school, they would have already had 93% of the typical in-person parent time.

43 years – the stereotypical working career from college graduation at age 22 to retirement at age 65. The time one has available for funding your retirement needs, as well as thing extras that make your retirement wonderful – like moving to that higher cost of living town where your children and grandchildren are.

50 years – a marriage milestone only 6% of current marriages have achieved

105 years – the age of the oldest veteran in Olmsted County, as of this summer.

100-300 years – the average lifespan of that oak tree I’m convincing you to plant next spring, positively impacting dozens of generations of children in your neighborhood.

What are you going to do with your next window of time? Will you be deliberate about it, or just let it pass you by?