TIME PASSAGES

The end of something often makes us think back to what has gone before. Perhaps we are just made this way. Possibly it is how we mark the passage of time in our lives.

Last night one of my nieces went to her High School Prom. Next week both of them will Graduate from High School. If such an important day in their lives doesn’t remind us that time is passing, probably nothing will.

At the same time, this particular event usually makes each of us reflect upon our own graduation. We later realize that this day is really important in our lives because it actually turns out to be the first time most of us realize that we have grown up and are adults.

We can’t help but remember how we felt at that time in our own lives. Most of us heard somewhere that our whole lives were ahead of us and the world was ‘out there’ and filled with opportunities. Something in us seemed to tell us that ‘the sky’s the limit’ and everything in life was ready to welcome us with open arms.

Do you remember when you still had no sense of mortality? Many of us do feel, and act with some sense of immortality, especially when we are that age. For some reason, you think you are going to live forever, or at least, many of us act as if we do. We seem ready to try anything, go anywhere and charge forward. It is, I remember, really exhilarating as well.

Meanwhile, when I meet my mother’s friend and contemporary who is 92 now and we have lunch together, we reflect on the fact that my mother died 21 years ago next month.

We also remember that the nieces who are graduating next week never met their grandmother. Something in us makes us pause and realize again that time ‘marches on’ and is again undeniably taking us through a new generations passage into adulthood. How can you not marvel?

An interesting song by Al Stewart and Peter White from 1978 called Time Passages reflected that ‘the years run too short and the days too fast’ and ‘the things you lean on are the things do not last’.* In retrospect we know how right they were in seeing this, when they and we, were still pretty young. I would say however, that they just saw this a lot sooner than most of us did.

Perhaps the rest of us just play catch up with what is important when we pause and take the time to mark important events and ‘rites of passage’ in our own and other people’s lives.

Maybe it doesn’t matter when we become wise enough to acknowledge important events in our lives and in the lives of those we care about. Maybe the important thing is that we somehow have reached the point where we understand that to go forward, you need to be smart enough to acknowledge and reflect upon where you have been. 

To consciously move forward in life, I think that, most if not all us, must be willing and able to take a breath in between, the passages of time in our lives.

*Time Passages by Al Stewart and Peter White, 1978.