Is another way of saying too much and too little to express. Too much background story to explain the impact of one day. Too much immediacy to even think about, or analyze today. I am a habitual analyzer, but not once today did I stop and ponder what I was experiencing. And now, it feels good not to figure out if there was any meaning.
People, I love'm.
There's this very extraverted kid. He's thirteen, and I remember well when he was born. In fact, I remember well when his older siblings were born. But he rattles away about when he was little, and I realize that "when he was little" was fairly close to when he was born, I mean, the difference of just a couple years. I forget that people are self aware so soon after they're born. Many people are self-aware before they are two. If I could play my earliest memories as a movie, it's like a screen with flickering images--sensations becoming expectations--the near-people becoming Mom, Dad, siblings. But after a bit of the flickering, it comes into focus and there I am, me. Ignorant, fresh, certain, self-centered.
So by the time I graduated from college, any kids born my freshman year have become self-aware, they have learned to talk, and they are probably already learning to write, and as far as they are concerned, they've been around a good long time. As far as they are concerned, their birthday is never going to come, but when it does, a whole new world of possibilities will open up and magic will happen. And as far as they concerned, birthdays will always be just that special.
By now, any kids born when I graduated college a year ago are practically walking; they are surely crawling around and getting into things and driving their mothers mad, but then smiling charmingly for the camera with a smile that will follow them through life.
What do I have to say for the last year? Well--okay--I'm young, still experiencing a lot of dynamics to slow time down. Lots of moves, job changes, world travelling. But I can't say I'm waiting breathlessly for my birthday, either. When I turn 24 I'll be ... 24, and?
Some girls my age have been married for a couple years. They got married, had a baby, and will keep having babies for the next fifteen or twenty years. Now they're a family with a couple toddlers. Now they're a family with a helpful little girl and more toddlers. Now they're a family with preteens down through toddlers. Now their eldest is learning to drive, down through toddlers. Now there is uncertainty, will there be more? Perhaps there will be toddler nieces and nephews now.
It's just weird that I'm old enough to witness that dynamic now, to see people my big brother's age, with preteens running around playing softball and already getting some idea of who they'll be as adults. Some of the girls with smudgy eyes too soon, already worried if they're lovable.
All this reminds me never to "worry" about benchmarks I haven't reached in life. I'll be an old lady before I know it, so I want to maximize every minute starting now instead of rushing to the next minute. And then gently let go of each minute as it passes.
I sat with a soon-to-leave friend once in the park, listening to Coldplay, knowing we would never again have a blissful, carefree moment like that. We sat there trying to hang onto the minutes, instead of just "being". As if we could somehow experience the time so fully as to make up for any past wishes for such carefree moments, and future nostalgia for the moment-gone-by. It gave me a curiously bittersweet, unsatisfactory feeling. I'm glad we tried it, but I'd be more for letting the minutes move on by, now. Even dare the minutes to hasten by.
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