20 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
20 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Time Is Weird
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date: 2024-09-08T18:21:58-04:00
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permalink: /time-is-weird/
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tags:
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- pondering
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---
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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?*
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. |