Another Month – Another Year

Sunday 1st February

When I was a child the future seemed endless.  At some point I realized that the Millenium would probably occur in my lifetime, though forty-nine seemed such a long way off that and I sort of figured I would be old and wrinkled by then and might not even notice it.  Notice it I did, and now it is way in the past.  Now we are well into 2015, a futuristic date if ever there was one.  I read 2001 a space odyssey in the late sixties and even then it seemed a bit too unrealistic a date for space travel to the stargate beyond Jupiter.  So what is it with time itself?  Why does it sometimes drag on and on, why do the seasons turn far too slowly and yet the years speed by?  Are other creatures aware of time, or is it for all intents and purposes a man-made concept?  Before we invented clocks and watches and now mobile phones to tell the time were past generations at all aware of time as we are?  Or is it more to do with our bodies, getting tired after the sun sets and waking as the dawn breaks.  And the morning mirror that greets us with a somewhat unrecognizable image of ourselves (surely we don’t look like that, surely not that old and haggard) that marks inexorably the passing of the years.

Each month that passes is another milestone – or furlong stone (remember them) on our life’s journey.  Trouble is we don’t quite know when the journey will end.  I suppose I mark my life by what I know of averages.  Today for men that is approaching eighty.  But my mum and dad are both still alive and quite healthy and striding into their mid-eighties, and I am in relatively good health – failing eyesight and hearing, but little else obviously wrong – so I assume I will reach at least eighty.  That is sixteen years from now.  Almost as long as since the millennium, and a quarter of the life I have lived so far.  Only twenty percent left you might say, and yet that thought does not depress me.  Surely it is the quality of those years and not the quantity that matters.  I probably wasted, or had little control of the first fifth.  The second I screwed up but had a lot of fun; the next two fifths I worked too hard and had too little enjoyment.  I seem to have turned a corner in the last six years or so and have reached a sort of plateau.  Work is less and less of a burden and will soon disappear, I worry about financial security in my old age but compared to many I have nothing to worry about.  I am writing again – though less than I would like and I am still listening to and buying and enjoying music.  Maybe I should stop counting the years or even the months and just count my blessings by the length of the song I am listening to.