THE WHOOSH OF TIME

Something happened this year that made me stop in my tracks. My brother turned 60 and joined the rest of us on this side of the age line. There are seven of us kids in the family story, one sadly no longer with us. Looking back to the way we were, it is as if someone snapped their fingers and, whoosh, we were propelled from childhood to adulthood in a flash. Where did the time go? A silly question, of course, but seriously, where did it go?

My parents married in 1947. Their first child was born in 1949, followed by births in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1956 and 1958 - seven children in nine years. The first of us died in 1974. My father died in 1982. My mother died in 2011. Numbers are our stepping stones, markers on this sometimes uneven road. But we are more than statistics although they do remind us of the whoosh of time!

Occasionally, and probably more than I should sometimes, I reflect on time, the passing years, looking back through the blur of nostalgia and imperfect memory, remembering so many good things that have happened in my life and also, of course, the not-so-good.

Here, in a kind of thoughts for the day mood, are some quotations about time:

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." Leo Tolstoy

"The time is always right to do what is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space. Johnny Cash

"Tough times never last, but tough people do." Robert H. Schuller

"Better three hours too soon than a minute too late." William Shakespeare

"You may delay, but time will not." Benjamin Franklin

"It takes a long time to become young." Pablo Picasso

"A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life." Charles Darwin.

Shakespeare's seven ages put us all in a nutshell: infancy, schoolchild, teenager, youth, middle age, old age, extreme old age. Some cover all of those bases, others only the first few. (Who the hell wants to live in a nutshell anyway?)

In this unsettled and unsettling world, we still have an opportunity at whatever age to make the most of it, make the best of it.

Here endeth the lesson!! 😘