Heart and Mind

"It Goes by so Quickly" (Age, Yearbooks, Blogs & Beards)

It's night-time.

One common cliché about life and aging is, "It goes by so quickly." And, of course, it does. Don't we all kind of wonder how we got where we are? I do. "Look at me! How'd I get to be the 34-year-old guy on the block out there spending my Saturday raking the leaves in the yard?" And it doesn't usually matter what age you are, it always seems like a long journey that went really quickly, Even when I was seventeen, for example, it seemed a little surreal, because I could remeber when, as a young kid, my perception of a seventeen year old was that of a really old, cool teenage-kid.

High school kids are way-cool when you're a younger kid. When I was young, I remember thinking that kids who were fifteen and sixteen were basically the same as adults, except they were tremendously cool (whereas real adults were kind of square). Teenagers were simply amazing. They were able to stay at home by themselves, some of them drove cars, the guys shaved... they seemed like my parents, or at least what my parents would be if they listened to RUSH and hung out in cars with their friends.

In fact, when I look at high school year books from, say, 1983 and earlier, the kids in their senior portraits still look old to me. In my eyes, they look like they're older than I feel like I look now. That's because I (still ) associate the styles that the then 17-year-olds were wearing with the concept of "older" people. (At the very least, this is true going back through yearbooks from the 1970s; when you start getting into yearbooks from the 1960s, the seniors still look old to me, but they just seem very square.)

It's all perception, of course. But that's OK. If the 92-pound anorexic can look at herself and see an overweight individual, I can look at pictures of the class of 1980 and be impressed by the "old, cool" seventeen year olds, right? In reality, they look like fresh-faced youths and I look like a dude fast approaching middle age (if I'm not there yet). But it doesn't seem that way. And the same is true when you go forward in time. Anyone I've ever seen with a toungue-piercing or wearing baggy jeans looks a little bit like a 12-year-old, no-good punk, even if he's 28.

I digress. No matter where you're at agewise, it probably seems pretty wild that you're there, if you think about it long enough. And when you do the math, it gets even more wild. You think about how quickly it's gone and about how old you're going to be when that much time passes again. Can we say fifty?

"It goes by quickily."

It's night-time. As you may recall, that was the first point I made in this essay. It's a relevant comment, because night-time is the time I most commonly reflect upon how fast things are moving. Why? Obviously, because it's the end of another day. in some ways, I hate going to bed, because you're basically conceding that another day has passed. "Today" was this new, promise-filled future at this time last night, but now it's already over. It sometimes blows my mind how many times in my life I've gotten up, done my thing, and then went to bed. It's flying by.

I'm not complaining and I'm not feeling melancholy about it. Well, regarding the latter, maybe I feel that way a little bit, but, honestly, not much. I deal with it pretty well, I think. But it still evokes some kind of emotion in me, whatever it is. It makes me think, wonder, reflect.

One thing I could have mentioned in that "60 Post" entry (two posts ago) is how this blog thing also can serve a little bit as a life journal. If you scan back in this blog to last fall, you'll find some musings about what kinds of things were running through my head as I approached my 34th birthday. It won't be long before I'll have thoughts about turning 35.

"It went by quickly," didn't it?

I find it pretty cool when I see people who have had blogs for 4 or 5 or more years. Talk about being able to reflect on your thoughts and feelings from a different moment in time!

When I was a kid, I remember reading in the Guiness Book of World Records about this guy who had the world's longest beard, and it said that it was so long that through the coloration of it, you could seen how he aged throughout his life, from the dark to the grey to the white. Blogs kind of have the potential to be like that. "It goes quickly," so keep track of it. Write, take pictures, save your emails, make recordings, share your memories. Whatever floats your boat.

posted by Steve @ 11:45 PM