Remember being a kid and thinking about adulthood? It seemed like a theory that would never be proven. Childhood lasted forever — every moment, experience, bowl of Quaker oatmeal seemed to require an eternity to complete.
Fast forward a few years, and we begin to experience time differently. Time moves with such haste, such speed, and we begin to understand why grandparents cannot remember what happened last week. For them, their time is somehow broken down into decades–the 50’s, 60’s, the 70’s–when did they graduate high school?
The speed of time. As we age, we acquire mass, it seems, and the speed at which we move through life increases in direct opposition to our ability to maintain our physical selves. We see wrinkles, run slower if at all, and a sadness creeps in that can only be explained by the realization that we are mortal.
Childhood ends when we realize the fundamental nature of time not only applies to us, it will bring us to our knees. If we have kids, then the even worse realization is that they will experience the same thing.
There is a laconic beauty to life. We are born, we die–and in between we have no memory of the former and pretend the latter does not exist until the illusion no longer works. Like Siegfried and Roy, the tiger will get us…