Three Hours and Thirty Years

“The future is composed of nows.”

— Emily Dickinson

I thought about this line a lot this week.

Because sometimes a few hours can feel like a lifetime… and sometimes thirty years can feel like the blink of an eye.

On Friday night, my daughter called. She is pregnant. Her due date is May 8th. We knew the baby would come early because of known medical complications, but the birth was planned. She would spend a few weeks in the hospital and have a scheduled C-section.

The baby had other ideas. As they usually do.

She said she was bleeding and heading to the ER. “It’s normal,” she told me. “No reason to come yet.” I didn’t trust that. I texted my son-in-law. The next message I received read, She’s headed into the OR. Get here as fast as you can.

The Anschutz Campus at the University of Colorado is enormous. I had never been there. I typed “ER” into WAZE and left. My son-in-law sent a Google map with the right parking lot and additional instructions. In my car, Google and WAZE began arguing. I couldn’t follow either one. Then he accidentally butt-dialed me and I lost the map altogether.

All I could hear were monitors beeping and my daughter crying.  “He’s too early. He’s so little.” I wanted to stay on the phone. But I also needed directions. Time suddenly felt like my biggest enemy.

I made it to the hospital just as a team of nurses and doctors rushed past pushing a cube on wheels, wires and monitors inside.  I got a brief glimpse of my grandson.  He was here. He was alive. My daughter was stable and would be in recovery soon.

As I waited for updates from the NICU, I realized it was the ninth weekend of 2026. Thirty years ago, on the ninth weekend of 1996, I took my mother to the hospital. She was dying of cancer. She passed away the following Monday.

My daughter gave birth, came out of recovery, and was on her way to meet her son in three hours. My mother had been gone for thirty years.

Three hours felt endless.

Thirty years felt like yesterday.

We live by the clock.  Minutes, hours, calendars, anniversaries. But the clock only tells us how much time has passed, not how time is experienced.  Fear stretches time.  Love compresses it.  Waiting expands it.  Memory collapses it.  Thirty seconds of uncertainty can feel unbearable. Thirty years of living can collapse into nothing more than a handful of vivid memories.

Memory does not replay every ordinary Tuesday. It gathers emotional landmarks.  Birth, loss, transformation, and builds a story from them. The rest, the ordinary, quietly recedes.  And yet, something important happens in those ordinary days.  Growth.  Becoming.

Thirty years ago, my six-year-old daughter ran across the lawn when I returned home after four days at the hospital with my mother. I could not have imagined that on the same weekend thirty years later she would become a mother herself.  And yet…. she was becoming that woman all along.  In the unnoticed days.  On the ordinary Tuesdays.  In the thousands of “nows” I did not mark on a calendar.

Here I was again, standing in a hospital hallway. This time not saying goodbye but waiting to say hello. The past and present folded together in ways my mind struggled to hold. Time did not feel linear. It felt like a spiral, circling back while still moving forward.

Life turns on moments that arrive without warning. A call. A diagnosis. A goodbye. A birth. They feel enormous while we are living them, yet astonishingly brief when we look back.

Time is something we believe we have plenty of.  Until we don’t. We assume tomorrow will come. Then one day we look back and wonder where all the yesterdays went.  We crave more time. We waste it. We cannot control how much we have. But we CAN choose to notice it and remind ourselves that we absolutely get to choose how we spend it. 

This week reminded me that the real work is not managing time but noticing who we are becoming within it.  Because while we are busy measuring hours and years, something quieter is happening.  We are changing.  Our children are changing. Our lives are changing.

The moments that feel longest while we live them often become the shortest when we remember them. And the years that seem to disappear may contain the most profound transformations of all.

Maybe time isn’t really measured in minutes or years.  Maybe it is measured in the moments that shape who we are becoming.

Three hours.

Thirty years.

Both composed entirely of “nows”.

What moments in your life made time stand still?  And which years now feel like they passed in a single breath?  It’s time to notice.  There is no time like the present.

Much. Love,

Lisa

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Lisa Hamil is a founding member and host for The SOS Collective, an online international women’s recovery and support group.  However, this blog and any classes or coaching offered by Lisa Hamil LLC are separate from and not affiliated in any way with The SOS Collective.