Flotsam & Jetsam

Of late, I have sort of been feeling as though I am more or less getting blown around by the winds of fate... I can't say whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; or even whether a value judgment is even necessary... it is simply an observation.

I think it is a bit silly of me to randomly pick some period of time and decide that I feel this way during this particular timeframe when, in actuality, this is basically the way it is for all of us, all the time!

I am feeling that I am hurtling along, more or less out of control, while 'things' and 'events' just sort of take place around me... and me having only the most peripheral influence over things...

One day is blurring into the next.. and I am doing this thing in my brain where I focus on one small daily recurring event and it is like watching this one event happen over and over through a zoetrope.. where each day is one picture, and the stream of days makes them appear to be rushing by at blazing speed.... I tend to wake up at more or less the same time in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.. I am generally muzzy, and sort of disoriented from sleepiness, and, in many cases, from having woken directly out of a dream, the shreds of which are still wisping around in my brain... well, it sometimes seems to me that the focus of my life narrows to this one event... getting up to pee... to the extent that my life becomes this recurring 'getting up to pee' activity, punctuated by tiny bits of 'other stuff'.

Of course.. in my waking life, this point of view vanishes and appears silly... but in the middle of the night, it seems to me that my life is just flashing by.. and that if I were to glance in the mirror, that I would actually be able to watch myself aging, and wasting away... as years fly by like clouds in a storm.. it saddens me in the middle of the night, when no one is available to me, and the night is deathly quiet, save for the squeak of the floor under my feet... and it occurs to me to wonder, as I am dropping back off to sleep, whether some guy, much like myself, in the year 1082CE or so, had these same, or similar, thoughts... and that guy, if he existed is now not even dust anymore... he is just gone.. just like I will be in what will seem at the time of my death to be no time at all. I know this, and I accept it... but, in the dead of night, it is sad, and gray, and drab, and depressing....

The same strange point of view is true of checking the mail, having my morning coffee, going to, and then returning from, work... and all of the other 'stations' of the day... they seem to expand, and all the other stuff seems to contract.

The result is that it seems that I spend 23 hours, 57 minutes, and 48 seconds doing not-shit BS, and 1 minute 10 seconds with my wife.. This isn't true, and I know this on an intellectual level.. but in my heart, I can feel the time shrieking past... and there isn't a damned thing that I can do about it.

I just know that I will wake up one morning and realize that I am a very old man.. with one foot in the grave, one foot on a banana peel, and everything of value in my life behind me...

But, then, I also think that this is probably true of all of us... one day this will happen.

On the surface of my brain, I attempt to siphon off every minuscule molecule of joy and appreciation from every single second of my life... and I think I am better at this than most... but, I turn around and the grass that I just mowed 'a few minutes ago' needs mowing again, the leftovers that I 'just put in the fridge' are a science project, and the furniture that I 'just dusted' has a layer of dust over it...

Summers, that used to be never-ending periods of warm, meandering days, and slow cricket and star-filled nights now blast past in a single three-month blip that doesn't allow me time to get out the suntan lotion. I consciously think, "It'll be summer in a month or so..." and the next observation is that the leaves have turned.

I don't want my life to fly by... I don't want this wonderful time with my gorgeous loving wife to spin out of my grasp... I don't want to watch myself wizen and shrivel and fade... but, I suppose I don't really have much of a choice in the matter.

I will resolve in my mind to slow down, to take time to enjoy things as they happen, and the next thing I know, I will be getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and it will feel as though I had just done this very same thing not two seconds ago...

We have to work, and we have to do all of those things that we have to do to keep the household running and everything in working order... and then, when we have the time to spend, we are so tired that we can barely keep our eyes open...

Every time one of us talks with a friend or family member, it is only to find out that someone else has died, has been diagnosed with cancer or some other hideous malady, or to be shocked to hear that the infant that we had just been informed was recently born is now graduating college.

When all that time flies by, I wonder where it goes?? I distinctly remember being six years old, and that couldn't have been more than a year or two ago... and a few minutes after that I was enlisting in the military, and then a second or two later, I was back home and 29 years old, and when I do the math, I am surprised and dismayed to learn that that was eighteen years ago!

My wife and I will celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary this coming September, and I honestly don't know where the time has gone...

So many things are happening, and so much of it has the potential to affect and to change everything in my life around.... and there isn't anything that I can do other than to simply accept it as it transpires. So this is what I do; I accept life as it presents itself to me. Often, I manage to find stillness at the center of things, and once I achieve this, I can generally maintain that stillness for some time.. until it slips away, and I am back in the maelstrom.

On top of all of it, I have a new boss that looks sort of like Danny Aiello, but with the most atrocious toupé that I have ever seen in my life. One day, a good while ago, he was getting up in the middle of the night to pee, and he was, perhaps, 47 years old or so... and now he is a fat old man, with a hideous rug on his head, in a more or less crappy dead-end job. I strongly doubt that he planned it out that way... but, nevertheless, that's how it turned out.

Even today; I got home from work, my wife walked in the door a few minutes after I did, and we had the whole night to look forward to together. We had a bite to eat, we sat down and wrote a letter to a friend of ours, and now it is almost 10PM and will soon be time for bed....

Is there a speed control on this thing??

I think that in the morning, rather than rolling over and burying my face in the pillow after that first brief encounter with consciousness and a new day, I will instead get up, and see what the morning has to offer...