No one talks about 39

I’m older now than I ever thought I would be.  I know that’s the nature of aging, and it’s been true since I turned about 26.  I couldn’t envision a life as an adult when I was younger, it was just inconceivable.  In my depressive moments I felt like this was because I wasn’t supposed to be here, that I was taking the place of someone else who deserved to be alive in my place.  Now I don’t feel that way as much, because I spend every year building the kind of life that I couldn’t conceive of when I was a child.

Some people around my age are terrified of getting older.  I do worry about getting older in that I worry about losing my abilities and I’m scared of dying and not existing anymore, but the people I hear voicing their fears about aging seem to be afraid of the concept of aging itself.  They’re the ones who think the 90s were a decade ago, can’t believe this film is turning 20 years old this year, or feel like they’re too young to be having children.  I’m not judging these people, their feelings are their feelings.  But I don’t feel the same about the concept of time passing.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future…

I always think of that bit of music when people complain about time moving too fast or too slowly.  It’s a perception game, but time is always passing us by.

When I was a child, at the start of some summer vacation, my father posed this question to me: what if, at the beginning of every day, you were given one hundred dollars.  You can spend it, invest it, do whatever you want.  But at the end of the day, any money left over will disappear.  You can’t save it for another day, you only have it for that day.  What would you do?

I was irrationally upset that I couldn’t save the money, not because I had a goal in mind but because I felt like there was a “right” way to use the money that I hadn’t thought of.  It took some explaining for me to understand that he was talking about time, trying to impress upon me that time is a use-it-or-lose-it thing.

I’m older now than I have ever been, and I will never have more time ahead in my life than right now.  There is only the present moment and a vague idea of the future.  I don’t want to take any time or ability for granted, I want to enjoy every minute I have.