Friday, September 14, 2012

Passages

I've been thinking a lot lately about the transitory nature of the time we get here on this ball of rock. 

I spend a great deal of my time these days among people who are elderly, ill, or just fragile, and have seen others decline into a shaky state of frailty in just the short time I've known them, sliding from hale and healthy into wraithlike shadows of themselves almost in an eyeblink. 

I've also just fledged a child out into the perilous realm of adulthood, watching her undergo all the rites of passage I was just experiencing yesterday. I swear it was just yesterday.

It's humbling and frustrating and melancholy and awakens in me an envy I barely understand. I'm humbled at the weight of time and infirmity and the forced acknowledgement of my own and others' mortality. I am frustrated that I have wasted - to my mind - a huge portion of the finite amount of time I get here on dithering and fiddling and fidgeting and have never gotten any further than here, than this. I am desperate and melancholy as I watch all these passages around me, unable to stop the inexorable slippery drift toward change, toward different, toward gone.

And I envy that girl, that beautiful, headstrong, brave girl who has just opened her eyes on a new life. I envy her freedom, her unmarked slate. I envy her choices. I envy all of her as-yet-unrealized dreams, even as I beam in the knowledge that it was partly my scratching, clawing fight against the smothering weights of poverty and entropy and depression that got her to a place from which she could leap. I am gleefully aware that I wouldn't let her quit, that I refused to let her drop a single dream, that I flatly rejected the idea that because she came from poverty she wouldn't have the same chances as anyone else. I can congratulate myself for that, even as I suffer in the knowledge that my chances are passing.

And I can accept that there are things I cannot control - movement, change, the hurtling path of this ball of rock through the cosmos. I can accept almost everything that has changed, everything that has moved. 

But I cannot bring myself to like the fact that things have to change at all. 

  

1 comment:

Tim aka Him said...

Whoa! I missed a blog? Could it be because of the infrequency caused by you not bothering to share the important things in life? Like ingrown nails and cat sickness and sock holes and breaking guitar strings?
(say...wasn't that a song from The Sound of Music?)
GET IN TOUCH, DAMMIT!