I love you, but I'm too busy for you-and there's always later, there's always tomorrow. By about age thirty, we adults barely notice the passing of mere seconds. In the currency of time, they're pennies, hardly able to buy anything of value. For little ones, however, every moment is weighty with possibility and so passes heavily and slowly. Consider, for instance, the evening we just witnessed-it passed particularly slowly for the little girl but blew past the man who is her father.
Seconds become minutes, of course, and minutes become hours.
Almost imperceptibly, hours become decades. One day, Jeff may indeed turn around to play with his little girl, only to find a young woman too busy tending her own life to notice-after all, she has learned by his example. Ask any parent of grown children, and he or she invariably will attest to how fast it all goes. Instead, we all know the final plea is for more time with those whose love fills and sustains us. The hard truth is that we have only a relatively small sliver of time in which to give our children the gifts of our experience, patience, wisdom, and heart.