I’ve been soaking up time.
I can feel the red of a maple leaf turning. I can catch
sight of a baby’s smile from across three aisles in the grocery store. I can luxuriate in sliding the zipper up on the
sides of my new, slinky, black boots. I’m on high alert.
I can hear the holiness of a guitar, appreciate the
molecular structure of water, and understand the meaning of a piece of art,
without formal study.
I can feel the texture of minutes passing, gritty sand falling through the narrow center of the hourglass.
The night that I turned 30, I sat in a bar feeling
distraught. I was out with my husband
and his sister and brother-in-law, wallowing in my utter disbelief that I was
not in my twenties anymore. Finally, my brother-in-law looked me in the eye and
said, “Amy, it’s no big deal. Time passes.”I can feel the texture of minutes passing, gritty sand falling through the narrow center of the hourglass.
His words shut me up and rightly so.
But time past was
still a jolt, a hand on my shoulder in the groggy morning whispering, “wake
up.”
It was a shallow,
ridiculous terror-thinking that 30 was old. But it was also only a symptom of a
larger mistake – a misuse of time.
Like an unappreciative lover, I used it. I got things done
and marked off accomplishments. Time was only a means to an end. And somehow,
on that night when I turned 30, I knew that this was missing the mark, and
that my obnoxious, whiny 30-year-old self was actually on to something.
Clarity is what surprises me most about the sixth decade. Though time is fleeting, there is no need for distress. Instead, I can know that in each moment, I fully lived.
