One Day Older
Barring a stock market crash, winning lottery ticket, or car accident, each new day is basically pretty similar to the day before. We wake up each morning look and feel pretty much like we did the morning before. Any changes tend to happen gradually over time as small differences accumulate in our lives. Enough drops of water, after all, will eventually make the amazon river.
Sometimes we see those changes as sudden but it is actually our realization of the accumulation of those drops of unnoticed moments. A memory, a particular date, or some event can trigger that realization.
Birthdays will do that to you though. I had a milestone one a while back. But I’m still thinking on it.
We all might at some time wish we were young again and had to years stretching before us with all their open-ended wealth of possibilities. But at some point, we realize that time is finite. We’re writing sonets and haikus with our lives now instead of the epic free verse we envisioned when younger. There are now more things I can never be, not because I might lack the ability, but more because I lack the time to gain the necessary experience.
We have strictures on us imposed by time and circumstance, and by our own choices and wishes. Many of those choices I celebrate and would do again the same way in my life. I’m fortunate since my big choices tended to work out well. But I see the range of possibilities for my wife and I starting to narrow.
I can’t do anything time moving forward. I can, however, make my choices more effectively. And with time comes (I hope) maturity to make those choices better. Perhaps that open-ended wealth of possibilities I saw when younger was partly an illusion anyhow.