@kfitz ????
Time Is Weird
There's this moment that happened a lot of years ago: I was walking through the living room of the apartment I was living in and the television was on playing god knows what, and something made me think, you know, the next time I'm 25 --, followed quickly by you big dope, that's not going to happen..., at which point I stopped dead and thought you do realize that standing right here, right now, is the youngest you will ever be again... right?
All of that happened in a split second, but I stood there for a solid minute taking it in, my head more silent than it had ever been. I just kind of froze, simultaneously shocked by the obviousness of the thought and by the fact that even though I'd obviously known that all along, that time only moves in one direction, that we only ever get older, I hadn't really internalized it until that moment.
I was 34 then, which seems like it was yesterday. Except it was the fall of 2001, and I was on my pre-tenure sabbatical, trying like crazy to finish the manuscript of my first book. It was not long after 9/11, and I was still having a hard time getting my brain to wrap itself around any number of things -- what was happening in the world around us, what I was trying to argue in my book, what time even was.
I had cause to remember this moment earlier today. I'm 57 now, and there's some core part of me that is genuinely unsure how that happened. I can sit down and do the math and it all adds up, and yet it doesn't make sense to me at all -- sense in the same internal way as that moment of realizing that I was only ever going to get older.
I have all kinds of physical evidence of the passage of time, in my creaky knees, my worsening eyesight, my ever-slowing metabolism, but there's something in me that just doesn't want to believe that it's all a one-way trip, that I can't recover parts of who I was or some of the paths I didn't take.
Don't get me wrong: even if I could go back, I wouldn't -- I have enjoyed my life and my work more and more as time has gone on, and I'm happier than I've ever been. And that retirement thing -- not too many years into the future -- looks pretty sweet.
It's just funny how even after all these years, I can still get tripped up by the sadness of time, the stuff that gets left behind, the things that never quite manifest. Time may only move in one direction, but I still find myself needing to learn the same things over and over again.
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