A Resolute New Year

Sitting at Starbucks I look to my right and see a man about twenty years my senior with grey wispy hair peering through glasses at his laptop screen while his pale and thin-skinned fingers scroll and type.  I turn back to inking my New Year’s blog with fountain pen in hand, now feeling like a scribe to some indeterminate age or perhaps just to my ego as a writer.

I find at the turn of each year, that looking into the future is like looking in a mirror – there is a very limited view of what is before you, and excellent vision of what lies behind.  I don’t know what to expect, not many of us do.  Perhaps that is why we write down our resolutions, to set goals in order to set the future.  I have done this, and almost always failed at this.  It is why I have stopped setting resolutions.

I also feel like learning from that clarified past I see in the mirror, gives me an idea what to do and not to do in my future without constraining the wonders of chance.  It is the same thought process I apply to having a bucket list.  Of course there are things I would like to do in my life, but I feel if I focus on certain things too much I might not notice the essential spirit of the journey I am living.

It is not as if I am going through the world with blinders, so much as going through the world with my eyes wide to see as much as possible.  I don’t begrudge the resolution writers or the list makers.  It simply isn’t me.  I am thankful for the strength to face whatever future I may have, grateful that in the spaces that make up majority of life I have my wife, children, dogs, and friends about to share it, and I look at the roof over my head counting my blessing that cold nights are made less cold and hot days more bearable for having it there.  What I have to offer as a New Year’s tribute is that I will face the challenges before me with an eye on my past mistakes, I will flow with change rather than fight it, I will work to be a better person to help make a small part of this world a better place, and I will take my wife’s hand and look into her eyes as we smile our way into 2017 and the many years ahead.  God bless and Happy New Year.

What the Hell is That?

It seems that in January of this year Khronos the god of time said, “Hey, Teever, what the hell is that?”  Humor being my default position, I turned my head while thinking of the wonderful SNL “What The Hell Is That” skit.  Instead of thinking of comedy, I should have resisted the urge to fall for the oldest trick in the book, because when I turned my head back around it was late December 2015.  Where did the time go?  Tempus fugit on wings getting mightier by the moment.

It used to take forever for my birthday to come around.  Forget about Christmas, when I was a kid it was little more than a weak hope, it took forever to arrive.  Summer vacation was a little more reliable and felt a little more achievable – just a little more.  But as I have grown older, the things that I waited for pass by at supersonic speeds barely giving me a glance.

I have a theory of why this is.  I have run the theory by my family and friends here, so why not bore a larger audience?  Time is relative.  Not in the Einsteinian since, but in a proportional sense.  This is where I lose most people who at this juncture in my theory begin to gesticulate wildly in random directions saying, “Hey, Teever, what the hell is that?”  And you know where I end up – talking to myself.  But if you have been willing to read this far, perhaps you will walk with me a little further.

My theory is best illustrated as follows:

1.      When you are born and first see the light of day (or the glaring maternity ward lights through clenched eyelids with your grandfather in the corner praying the rosary as much for a healthy grandchild as to be spared the exact details of natural childbirth – inside joke, consult my family for explanation), even a second is incredibly long because in the next second you are twice as old as you were.  Think of it, at one second old, a year is 35 ½ million times longer than your young life.

2.      When you are one-year-old, face buried in birthday cake while your parents click away with their cameras or phones assured by your determined motions you are still breathing, you and a year are on equal footing.

3.      Down the road at ten, a year is no longer as daunting as it once was.  A year is only one tenth of your life and getting relatively smaller all the time.

4.      I am now 53, and a year is less than 2% of my life.  The years fly leaving me to feel as if I am wearing roller blades on a treadmill foolishly and helplessly watching the world turn beneath my wheels.

It is not a difficult theory, nor is it earth shattering (even if I give it a name like “The Asymptotic Behavior of Time Relative to Life”).  It is really just me trying to rationalize why it is increasingly difficult to accomplish anything in a hectic life.

However, thinking of time in this way has shown me that we are part of a miraculous and chaotic dance.  The young at the Arthur Murray stage following foot prints on the floor, with each successive generation getting a step closer to mastering the Tango.  So as the clock ticks down the seconds to the next in a ceaseless procession of new years, enjoy the dance, and make your resolution one to teach those learning by looking at their feet, and for you to learn from their attention to details you may have missed.  Part of leaving the world a better place, is passing it on to good and prepared hands.  Happy New Year, and if you could just look over there.  Over your right shoulder…no there…what the hell is that?