As Time goes by

I have been thinking during the last couple of days about how we mark time. We know that a day has passed when we have seen the sun make its 12 hour journey across the sky, and we have gone from darkness, into the light, and settled back into the darkness once more. A week is simply made of seven of these cycles, and month of 30. We can know a year has passed, at least here in New York, because we can watch the days go from crystalline winter, into the bright and colorful promise of springtime, then into the hazy, sun kissed days of summer, descending into the riot of rich, saturated, crisp autumn, and emerging on the other side, into the dazzling snowy mornings of winter once more. SO certainly, we mark the passage of time. We note that some unit of measure has gone by us, mechanically changing our calendars when a month passes, or digging out softly comforting sweaters when mother nature leaves us to the care of the great North Wind. But how do we mark time in our lives?

For me, marking the passage of a year of my life is simply that, taking notice of the passing of 365 days, and all that happened that year. But I never feel any different the day after my birthday than I did the day before. My life seems like a blurred image of year after year of changes so imperceptible that I hardly notice them passing. Certainly, looking back, I recognise the difference between who I am and where I have come to now in comparison to five years ago, and I hardly remember the little girl who used to sit cuddled in blanket pajamas in my grandfather's lap. All of the girls and women I have been are surely part of the woman I am now, but I have no acute sense of the time when I left each of those in the past to become the next.

It seems to me that we can never really know that a phase of our life, a persona that we brought to life for some period of months or years, has become a part of the fabric that makes up our own personal history. We can only look back as if from the top of a tall hill, into the valley of the years past and observe what our life was, and how the stepping stones in the path to ourselves wound through it.

If I ever have a child, I would like to think that I will be able to mark, for myself, the retirement of each little person as they pass into memory, because I think those moments are the ones that makes the best stories.

Here's to a life made up of stories, and history of rich characters who all lived their part of each of our lives well, and with passion.