Welcome to my weird world!

Milestones in Time

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change."
Thomas Hardy

I have just been talking to a friend about the way in which time passes without us noticing until something makes us think about it. For instance, a most arbitrary time marker: the release-date anniversary of a film whose release is in some way connected in our minds with a particular period of our lives. In my case, Disney's The Lion King is a big one for me this year, because I remember so clearly going to see it as a child, with my parents, and this year it is 20 years old.

In some ways this is a scary thought: have I achieved everything I could have done in the intervening years? The answer is undoubtedly not, but does that matter? I have achieved what I have achieved and that's just the way it is: I can't go back and achieve anything more, so there's no point considering what I could have done. Sure, I can look back and learn from the periods where I perhaps didn't make the best decisions but then I'm not sure I'd necessarily make the same ones now anyway: each decision and its results has shaped the person I now am and adjusted my responses to future choices.

Perhaps that's why, in most ways, the passage of time doesn't bother me at all. It's scary only in an abstract sense: an acknowledgement of how much goes by without me noticing it. Aside from that, time just is. It was my birthday on Sunday and I know that some people hate birthdays and hate to admit or even think about their age, but neither bothers me. I am 32 years old. It's just a fact; just a number relating to me, much like the fact that I am 67 inches tall, or that I have ten toes. Perhaps I'll feel different when I turn 40 or 50... or perhaps not.

I'll just have to wait and see and, in the end, isn't that part of what's so exciting about life? The fact that these anniversaries are suddenly upon us when we were so busy with the minutiae of our daily lives, giving us an opportunity to stop and reflect on the years that have passed, and everything they have brought us, or indeed taken away? Perhaps more than that, aren't anniversaries an opportunity to think ahead and consider what we might want to be looking back on when the next anniversary rolls around? And if we're looking back on something completely different by the time we get to that anniversary? Well, then we've deviated from what we thought we wanted but we've done something else instead, and anyway, what did we know ten years ago, hey?

"You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.”
José Saramago