Tick-tock. Years pass. Whoever thought, when I grew up in the fifties, that computers would rock my world? Everybody else’s too. So much I never learned in school. So much I was sheltered from in life.
Time ages all of us who are lucky enough to survive high school, not killed by a football accident or a new driver or a school shooter or a bomb hidden in a balloon high over Montana.
I keep saying that time is man made, but Mr. Husby pointed out that time comes from God. He’s right. The seasons and the regularity with which they show up come from God. Days and nights are regulated by God and He brings the seasons around when the time is right. Months are regulated by the moon. Years are regulated by holidays and other commerce-induced criteria. The way we measure time, the way we respond to it, is somewhat man made.
Sometimes I imagine myself coming across the prairie in a covered wagon with the son I don’t have and his family. I would not make it. I’m too old for that kind of thing, yet all kinds of women in their seventies are making the world a better place in 2023. Medical science extends lives. They extended Mr. Husby’s when he had a heart attack. Pain pills have allowed me to have a continuing quality of life rather than lying around cringing.
Time has mellowed me and taught me to accept the things I cannot change. It found me a late-in-life husband. It gave me the gift of caring for my mother as she declined, the gift of sharing with students, and the gift of sharing books I wrote and WriterAdvice, www.writeradvice.com, with the world. Next week it will give me a chance to be an editor at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Today it gives me the gift of running a workshop for Story Circle Network.
Someday my time will run out. When that happens, my soul will separate from my body and be transported to another world where the vibrations are much higher. At least that’s what I’ve heard. I hear a lot of things, and time has taught me to take most information and news with a grain of salt.
Still I think there’s something beyond me and my fellow humans, something that gives us the gift of time and life. What we do with it is up to us.