Why are we in a Big Hurry?

By Dan Barber

Each morning on my 8-mile commute to work there are many vehicles speeding along passing me. But it seems that when I arrive at the traffic light those speeders are setting there waiting for my arrival. Also, I’ve noticed on more than one occasion that we all arrive at work within seconds of each other. Why waste that gas and risk a possible expensive speeding ticket for just a few seconds of time.

If speed is their need, they might want to consider that all of us are speeding along on the same path and we will all reach the untimate destination eventually, some will arrive at their final destiny sooner than others… I would prefer to reach it much later in life.

I used to have that need for speed. Before I reached the age of 18 I was one of those traffic violators. I received a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles telling me that if I got one more ticket for speeding I would loose my driver’s license until I reached the age of 21… as a 17-year old kid in California and not having a license to drive was a fate worse than…death?

Well maybe it’s not that bad, but since that DMV warning, I tried to become a very responsible driver. In the 40 plus years since, I’ve only received one speeding ticket. Perhaps the older we get the slower we get. I recently asked Diane, my wife, to “hurry up,” so we could get somewhere, she replied, “I am hurrying!” That struck me as very funny because she was moving real slow… my new pet name for her now is “Slo-Mo.”

I guess the kids now are just the same as kids have always been… they want everything right now, or as I call it “instant gratification.” It seems like just yesterday when I was sitting on my grandparents front porch thinking that my life was about to be over because my Mom and Dad were moving us out of grandma and grandpa’s house in Omaha Nebraska to a new home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. But when you’re 5-years-old that 5 mile distance might just as well be as far as the moon is from the earth.

During a cross country trip once, I took my wife and children by the old neighborhoods I lived in as a child. Everything seemed really small. When I was a child and had to walk to school in the Iowa snow it seemed to take forever. Actually the school was only about two short blocks from my old house. We then drove the 5 miles across the bridge over the Missouri River to my old neighborhood in Omaha… everything there also seemed really small.

I guess when we are small and believe that we are the center of the universe, everything is bigger, better and everlasting. But when we travel at the speed of life to our eventual destination we come to learn that we are not immortal, but just a speck in the infinite universe traveling on a planet that is speeding through space along with our galaxy at nearly 830,000 miles per hour, and with the earth spinning at the equator at around 1,000 miles per hour and orbiting our sun at more than 660,000 miles per hour.

Maybe it would be a good idea to slow down and enjoy the majesty of our existence while we still have the time.